Comments on ISO/IEC 26300:2006

Description of issue

It is stated “In the OpenDocument file format, a variable must be declared at the beginning of a document”.

What exactly is meant by “the beginning of a document”?

Proposal

Clarify the text.

Topic for discussion

The word “must” is here used incorrectly as prescribed by the ISO/IEC Directives. Are this and other similar usages defects that should be corrected?

Description of issue

It is stated “OpenDocument text documents can contain variables, which are processed or displayed using variable fields”.

Are variables limited to OpenDocument text documents? This provision is a restriction upon the schema.

Why is the choice between processing or displaying variables. Cannot both activities be performed?

Proposal

Clarify the text to answer the above questions.

Description of issue

It is stated “The draw:extrusion-first-light-harsh attribute specifies if the primary light is harsh”.

This is the only commentary on this element: it is not sufficiently specified to implement at all, let alone implement interoperably.

Proposal

Provide a sufficient description of how this element is to be processed, or clarify that its implementation is application-dependent.

Description of issue

Regular expressions are mentioned here, yet this Standard has no normative reference to a regular expression language definition.

Proposal

Provide a normative reference for regular expressions, or clarify that regular expression processing is application-dependent.

Description of issue

This clause mentions the <draw:contour-polygon> and <draw:contour-path> elements. However the function of purpose elements is not defined except with the words “[t]hese elements describe the contour of an image or object.”

Proposal

Provide a description of how a processor is to interpret these elements in an interoperable manner (by specifying how a contour is determined), or clarify that there is no interoperability intent and that interpretation is application-dependent.

Description of issue

It is stated that:

The version number is in the format revision.version. If the file has a version known to an XML processor, it may validate the document. Otherwise, it is optional to validate the document, but the document must be well formed.

However:

• No “XML Processor” has an understanding of such attributes. Perhaps what is meant here is “ODF processor”?
• There is a false opposition between the two given behaviours here since one is governed by the word “may” and the other is described as optional. So as stated, both behaviours are in fact optional; furthermore there is an implication that a document with an unrecognized version attribute may not be well-formed. This is confusing.
• DTD-governed MathML content within ODF documents may have different content depending on how the DTD is processed, since the DTD contains attribute defaulting; so the different behaviours given here may result in different documents. The behaviour in such circumstances should be clarified (even if to state it is application-dependent).

Proposal

Amend the text to resolve the above defects.

Description of issue

This clause states “[u]se the style:text-combine property to combine characters so that they are displayed within two lines”.

It is unclear what “within two lines” means; does this allude to oriental typsetting coventions?

Proposal

Clarify the wording of the provisions in this clause.

Description of issue

The reference to the ZIP file format gives the URL ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/doc/appnote-970311-iz.zip

At the time of writing (2009-10-11) this resource, hosted on a commercial web site owned by a US company, is password-protected.

It is imperative that referenced resources are both authoritative and accessible; this is neither.

Proposal

Reference the variant of the ZIP file format specification required by this Standard in an authoritative and accessible manner.

Description of issue

It is stated that “Table 1 lists the namespaces that are defined by the OpenDocument format and their default prefixes”. However the prefix draw, used throughout the Standard, is not here listed.

Proposal

Amend the drawing prefix to draw in the table.

Description of issue

It is stated that “In conformance with the W3C XML specification [XML1.0], optional white-space characters that are contained in elements that have element content (in other words that must contain elements only but not text) are ignored”.

• It is not clear what “optional white-space characters” are (the term is not defined in XML 1.0), or how the described behaviour conforms to XML 1.0.
• Does the phrase “elements that have element content” mean elements that have only element content? This cannot make sense, as whitespace is itself text content.
• Consider the markup <text:p><text:span>Hello</text:span> <text:span>world</text:span></text:p>. If processed according to the text above, the space between the words here would be ignored, yet no known ODF processor actually respects this provision.

Proposal

Reform the text to answer the above queries and modify the stated processing behaviour to accord with the existing corpus of documents and processors.