Interoperability Enhancement Proposal: Suggested ODF1.2 items

This is the fifth of the six major iX - interoperability enhancement proposals submitted to the OASIS ODF TC - SC between July 2006 and February of 2007.

This particular iX proposal lead to the "List Enhancement Proposal" donnybrook that consumed the OASIS ODF TC for the next six months, ending with the OpenDocument Foundation being booted out of OASIS in May of 2007.

The six iX proposals were all different approaches to the same basic problem: ODF was not desinged to be interoperable with MSOffice documents, applications or bound processes. The proposals come out of the OpenDocument' Foundation's efforts to save ODF in Massachusetts.

ODF iX repressents a subset of ODF designed to grealty improve compatibility with MS binary and XML formats. With the ODF iX subset, the da Vinci plug-in would be able to convert the billions of MSOffice binary and xml documents with a very high level of fidelity, and do so within the bounds of "round trip" business processes.

The most basic iX approach was to add five generic elements to the existing ODF specification. The five generic elements would cover lists, tables, fields, sections, and page dynamics (breaks).

It is a well known fact that these five areas of incompatibility between OpenOffice ODF and MSOffice binaries represent 95% of all conversion fidelity problems. MSOffice has one way of implementing lists, and, OpenOffice has another. These application specific implementation models are irreconcilably different.

It's also true that the applicaiton specific implementation models are directly reflected in each file format. So applications implementing ODF must also implement the OpenOffice model for lists, fields, tables, sections and page dynamics-page positioning if they are to have any meaningful measure of exchange fidelity.

Perhaps the best of the iX approaches was that based on the innovative use of metadata to describe presentation-layout attributes. There were two submissions by OpenDocument Foundation members relating to this method. The first came in August of 2006 and was accepted as part of the OASIS ODF Metadata SC "Requirements" document. The second was submitted in February of 2007, also a s part of the Metadata CS work.

By April of 2007, when votes on both the "List Enahncement Proposal" vote and the "Metadata 1.2" were taken, the Foundation's proposals were eitther dropped or defeated.

In May of 2007, OASiS moved to enforce a rule change eliminating the ability of 501(c)3 non profit corporations to sponsor OASIS participants. This evisceration of our membership effectively ended the Foundation's role with OASIS ODF.

It also ended any hope of an ODF subset geared towrds interoperability with MSOffice and high fidelity conversion of billions of MS binary and xml documents.