What is or is not a legacy feature?

[Shawn Villaron]

Interesting.  I was actually worried about the producer case.

In Office "15" we've implemented the ability to save customer documents using the Strict syntax.  If WG4 was to remove one of the two syntaxes you mention below, we'd then be generating non-compliant files, right?



From: Francis Cave [mailto:francis at franciscave.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 7:15 AM
To: e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: What is or is not a legacy feature?

Hi Shawn

Obviously these would be breaking changes for consumers, given the way we have defined Strict (i.e. everything that is currently in Part 1), but not for producers. We might wish to consider giving some guidance to producer implementers in such cases. But let's see what the Word guys have to say...

Regards,

Francis



From: Shawn Villaron [mailto:shawnv at microsoft.com]<mailto:[mailto:shawnv at microsoft.com]>
Sent: 21 February 2012 15:09
To: francis at franciscave.com<mailto:francis at franciscave.com>; e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org<mailto:e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org>
Subject: RE: What is or is not a legacy feature?

Interesting. Let me ask the Word guys to get back to you on this.

I do feel compelled to point out that if we were to remove one of the constructs from Strict, it's a breaking change, which we try to avoid.  But I'm sure everyone knows that ...

I'll try to get you a response by the end of the week.

From: Francis Cave [mailto:francis at franciscave.com]<mailto:[mailto:francis at franciscave.com]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 7:08 AM
To: e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org<mailto:e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org>
Subject: RE: What is or is not a legacy feature?

While I think of it, the same issue arises with two run properties in WordprocessingML: w:highlight and w:shd. Although section 17.3.2.15 does document the interaction between these two elements, as far as I can see anything that be expressed using w:highlight (which only controls background colour, and only uses colour names) can be expressed using w:shd. This suggests that any new producer implementation of WML Strict would probably not implement both ways, and would probably choose to implement w:shd as the more powerful of the two. This in turn suggests that w:highlight could be considered to be a legacy feature.

Francis



From: Francis Cave [mailto:francis at franciscave.com]<mailto:[mailto:francis at franciscave.com]>
Sent: 21 February 2012 14:58
To: 'e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org'
Subject: What is or is not a legacy feature?

I have recently needed to review the way that form controls can be represented in OOXML. It seems that there are two approaches, and both of these are documented in Part 1. The first approach is to use fields as documented in section 17.16. The second approach is to use structured document tags as documented in section 17.5.

There seems to be a fair amount of overlap in functionality between these two approaches, and this has caused me to wonder whether one of these (probably the use of fields) should be considered a "legacy" approach and moved to Part 4.

There appears to be some support for doing just that in an unlikely place: in the Microsoft Word 2007 / 2010 user interface. The tools for inserting form fields into a document are grouped together in a box labelled "Legacy Forms".

I'd be interested to hear expert opinions on this.

Cheers,

Francis
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