"The Namespace Discussion" on ISO/IEC 29500

[Shawn Villaron]

Again, it's going to come down to how the implementers decide to deal with unexpected data.  For example, if an implementation runs across the compliance attribute ( not part of Ecma 376 1st ), the implementer will need to decide to abort the open, to ignore the attribute and continue opening the file, etc., etc.  From what I've seen so far -- clearly not scientific -- is that most implementations deal with unexpected data loosely and hence can successfully open the file; in these cases, the implementations attempt to retain every bit of understood data they can; data which is understood is lost at open time.

To be clear, this is an implementer's choice.  From a technical perspective, the implementer can write more code to improve the experience.  Like many of these decisions which we defer to the implementer, this will be a great opportunity for innovation and competition.  


-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Brown [mailto:alexb at griffinbrown.co.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 4:29 AM
To: MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given); SC 34 WG4
Subject: RE: "The Namespace Discussion" on ISO/IEC 29500

Dear all,

The last bullet point for Proposal 2's implications states:

"In most cases, documents complying with the strict conformance class using the conformance attribute will load in existing applications supporting only ECMA-376 1st Ed. without any problems."

Are we really confident about that "most cases" qualification?

- Alex.


--
Alex Brown
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 WG 1
Editor, ISO/IEC 19757-5 (Extensible Datatypes)