A thought on MCE Best Practices

Francis Cave francis at franciscave.com
Wed Sep 23 12:07:07 CEST 2015


Caroline

Greetings from Beijing.

Thank you for reminding me about my earlier contribution. I have looked 
at this again and have two observations:

1) The requirement for consumers to "not fail to load a document 
containing unknown relationships" is in §9.1.7 of Part 1.
2) This same clause makes it clear that consumers that are also 
producers "can, but are not required to roundtrip and preserve unknown 
relationships and their target parts".

This means that the divergent behaviours of MS Office and LibreOffice is 
allowed by the standard.

This divergent behaviour applies regardless of whether the unknown 
relationship is added to the package-relationship item or is added to 
the main document part-relationship item (see §11 of Part 1).

I have considered the "guidance" provided at the end of §9.1.7 of Part 
1, to "use instead the known relationship type for Custom XML Data 
Storage parts", as defined in §15.2.4. However, I'm not sure of the 
status of this feature - I don't believe it is implemented any longer 
due to IPR issues - so we should consider whether it would be best 
practice to ignore this guidance and just use unknown relationships for 
incorporating foreign parts that aren't able to use any other known 
relationships.

Kind regards,

Francis



On 22/09/2015 03:07, Arms, Caroline wrote:
>
> All,
>
> I have one immediate set of thoughts about the MCE Best Practices 
> document – which goes back to the topic of embedding rich metadata in 
> OOXML packages.  I’m attaching what I believe to be the last email 
> (from Francis) on that topic.  Francis’s email points out that 
> LibreOffice does not preserve foreign parts (or the version he tried 
> didn’t).  Is the Best Practices document intended to encourage 
> LibreOffice to preserve them?
>
> Has using rich XML metadata been considered as a second example of a 
> foreign part?  I would very much like to see that added. ONIX (as used 
> by Francis) is a good example for a DOCX document.  ISO 19139 
> (Geographic Information – Metadata – XML schema implementation) might 
> be appropriate for an XLSX document.
>
>   Have fun in Beijing!
>
>   Caroline
>
> Caroline Arms
>
> Library of Congress Contractor
>
> Co-compiler of Sustainability of Digital Formats resource 
> http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/
>
> ** Views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of the 
> institution **
>
> *From:*Francis Cave [mailto:francis at franciscave.com]
> *Sent:* Thursday, August 21, 2014 11:26 AM
> *To:* e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
> *Subject:* WML document containing metadata as a foreign part
>
> Further to discussion on today’s WG4 telecon, I attach a WML file in 
> which I have embedded some ONIX metadata – see docProps/onix.xml – 
> which is one of the metadata examples mentioned by Murata-san.
>
> In _rels/.rels I have added:
>
> <RelationshipTarget="docProps/onix.xml"Type="http://www.example.com/relationships/foreign-metadata"Id="rId4">
>
> If I open the document in MS Office (Word 2013), then save it, the 
> foreign part and associated Relationship are preserved.
>
> However, if I open the same document in LibreOffice, then save it (in 
> WML format), the foreign part and associated Relationship are dropped.
>
> So we cannot recommend this approach without making it clear that 
> consuming applications may choose to ignore such foreign parts.
>
> Francis
>

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