The future of "Transitional": Japanese concern

[MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)]

(Wearing my Japanese hat again)

The Japanese SC34 mirror has a particular concern about the future of
the conformance class "transitional".  This concern is related with
our hope to extend OOXML for a better support of the Japanese
typography.

We hope that small extensions for the Japanese typography are
applicable to OOXML documents for old MS Office such as MS Office
2003.  We are aware that old MS Office is not guaranteed to use or
even preserve such extensions, but we nevertheless would like to avoid
loss of information wherever possible.  (Note: some features do not
require any changes in the kernel of the formatting engine, since they
merely provide different ways for specifying KIHONHANMEN [page
design].)

Since old MS Office appears to be unable to handle the conformance
class "strict", we would like to introduce extend both the conformance
classes "strict" and "transitional".

For this reason, we are are against withdrawal and stabilization of
the conformance class "transitional" in a hurry, and feel uneasy
about prohibiting extensions of "transitional".

Regards,

Japanese mirror for SC34
MURATA Makoto