The future of "Transitional": Japanese concern

[MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)]

Francis,
 
(Again wearing my Japanese hat)

> The agreed UK position is that the purpose of the Transitional conformance class and 
>features, as specified in Part 4, is to provide faithful representation
>of legacy documents. 

It appears that your understanding of "legacy documents" appears to be
different from ours.  In our understading, document that have been 
or will be created, modified, or viewed  by legacy software are 
legacy documents.  After all, isn't it very difficult to create strict 
documents using existing MS Office in the future?

>If the old versions of Microsoft Office and other systems that were
>used to produce these legacy documents were unable to format text in all
>languages correctly (which is hardly surprising, by the way), Part 4
>should enable us to represent those documents faithfully INCLUDING all
>typographic lacunae. In other words, if a typographic feature was
>missing and could not be expressed in a legacy document, it would be
>wrong to try to rewrite history by enhancing Part 4 and thereby
>"correcting" the presentation of old documents.

An important omission in MS Word is not  inability to format documents 
correctly but rather inability to recognize page layout specified 
in terms of KIHONHANMEN (see 2.2.4 http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-jlreq-20090604/#en-subheading1_1_4
of the requirement document) rather than margins.  I guess that 
it is possible to create OOXML extensions so that documents can
contain specifications in terms of KIHONHAMEN *as well as* 
margins.  Legacy software is expected to handle such documents 
and produce good layout using margin information, while new 
applications can further provide better user interfaces in terms of 
KIHONHANMEN.

Cheers,
Makoto