One more thing about floor=ceiling.

Later, not realizing the connection to the floor=ceiling case until now, I took on as an architectural practice for interfaces and specifications that it is always easier to relax a restriction later than it is to later restrict a relaxed definition. When I am in a quandary over some provision, this is always a valuable tie-breaker for me. (I call this the Wilson Principle for Richard Wilson, an internal-systems architect at Xerox in the 70's.)

We find ourselves facing the second situation, not the first, and we have a number of "extension" points baked in. We will have to decide what we will do, normatively, about the 1.2-ness of scripts in languages specified by a QName prefix, table formulas (ditto), defined extension provisions in the repertoire of formula functions, etc.

By the way, I have no objection to conformant being tightly defined, although honoring the strict schema by itself won't do the job we think it accomplishes, depending on how the above things are accounted for in the schema (I don't know), and how things like binary sub-files having vnd.* MIME types are to be accounted for.

It may be that loosely-conformant is the wrong term, but neither conformant nor loosely-conformant, at the moment, determine whether interoperability will be easy or hard. What I like about loosely-conformant is that it provides that there be a conformant document in there, given certain adjustments. (There are also some edge cases that one might worry about, where dropping an attribute means there is no attribute in a way that impairs the document, table cell formulas being an interesting case. This condition only works well for ODF 1.2 because of its completeness with OpenFormula. This is an argument for recognizing those cases as loosely-conformant, but it is not my ox that gets gored if only the OpenFormula case qualifies in a conformant spreadsheet document.)

- Dennis

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