What is or is not a legacy feature?

[Francis Cave]

Hi Shawn

 

A specific question that you could pose to the Word guys would be: is all
the functionality of form controls, as represented by fields, expressible
using structured document tags?

 

Francis

 

 

From: Francis Cave [mailto:francis at franciscave.com] 
Sent: 21 February 2012 16:20
To: e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: What is or is not a legacy feature?

 

Hi Shawn

 

I agree there's a timing issue. If a feature was removed from Strict right
now, this would clearly be problematic for any implementer of Strict, such
as Microsoft, that is planning to release a substantial implementation
anytime soon. So I would not favour taking any precipitous action about
this. I suppose what I'm suggesting is that one should be looking to provide
guidance to implementers on which features are likely to be either
deprecated in Part 1 or moved to Part 4 at some point in the future. But I
do appreciate that this may open up a range of other issues, so I'm
certainly not suggesting that we do anything other than talk about it for
the time being. 

 

My motivation is simple. As an implementer of automated software tools that
consume and produce WML documents, I see two features that appear to do the
same thing and I ask myself: which of these alternatives do I have to
support, now and in the future? It looks like there's a legacy feature (form
fields) that I might not have to worry about long term, but that isn't clear
in the WML specification.

 

Regards,

 

Francis

 

 

 

 

From: Shawn Villaron [mailto:shawnv at microsoft.com] 
Sent: 21 February 2012 15:26
To: francis at franciscave.com; e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: What is or is not a legacy feature?

 

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] 
Sent: 21 February 2012 15:09
To: francis at franciscave.com; 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] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 7:08 AM
To: 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] 
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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