DR 11-0021 ? WML: Support for DrawingML inadequately specified

[Chris Rae]

We have to accept that the corpus of legacy documents is going to expand at the moment, chiefly because it has to track the corpus of legacy applications. With any "new" document format, there's the perennial problem of how one shares that document with users who have an older version of software (or an unknown version of software). The most obvious case is users in different organisations, but perhaps the more critical one is users in the same organisation with a staged software rollout - most corporate customers will take a year or two to steadily roll out new software or IT policies, and a part of that plan always requires some sort of easy migration between users who have been upgraded and users who haven't.

For a file format to succeed, implementers need to provide a good story for both forward and backward conversion. I would much prefer that this is done by "carrot" (adding new features to the new format) rather than stick (not fixing errors or omissions in the old format).

This seems like a good topic for discussion in person - I just wanted to answer Alex's question about the scenario I'm concerned about.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Brown [mailto:alexb at griffinbrown.co.uk] 
Sent: 10 June 2011 07:13
To: Chris Rae; MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given); e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: DR 11-0021 ? WML: Support for DrawingML inadequately specified

Dear Chris, all,

> As an implementer I would much prefer that these changes were also 
> adopted in Part 4, as otherwise we are going to experience data loss 
> when converting Strict documents to Transitional ones

Since when has T been a conversion target for S documents? Isn't the scope of T that it represents the existing corpus of legacy documents? that being the case - we shouldn't be extending the format  should we?

I can't imagine any scenario where this kind of conversion would be helpful: what am I missing?

- Alex. 

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