[ODFPlugtest] writing implementation specific defaults

[Roman Korchagin]

Pardon me for jumping into discussion, I was only "virtually" present at the
event.

Although these are "flow documents" and this implies they "might" appear
laid out into pages differently (especially when done by different
applications), 
you will be surprised how many customers actually come back and report this
as critical issues (that we have to think about fixing somehow). Not having
default values or having them application specific is an open invitation for
this sort of scenarios.

Maybe the standard should specify culture specific defaults then.
P.S. I recall that binary DOC has page size and margins etc default values
different for different cultures. Don't remember seeing this in OOXML
though. 


Regards,
Roman Korchagin

-----Original Message-----
From: plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org
[mailto:plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org] On Behalf Of Sander Marechal
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 9:26 PM
To: ODF Plugfest mailinglist
Subject: Re: [ODFPlugtest] writing implementation specific defaults

Wouter van Vugt wrote:
> It must be me, but shouldn't default values be part of the spec instead
> of the application?

Nope. That was rebutted pretty quickly during the plugfest. Take page
size for example. What should be the default? A4? US Letter? You can't
put that in the standard because the correct response is "it depends".

What makes a sensible default for one application does not need to be
sensible for another. To take it further, the correct default margins
probably depend on the page size.

I think it would seriously bloat the spec to try to include all these
defaults in it. For some settings it may make sense to push them to the
spec but for other settings it does not. The latter need to be written
to the document.

-- 
Sander Marechal
_______________________________________________
Plugtest mailing list
Plugtest at opendocsociety.org
http://lists.opendocsociety.org/mailman/listinfo/plugtest