[ODFPlugtest] MSO does not read LO files

[robert_weir at us.ibm.com]

plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org wrote on 06/27/2011 06:54:06 PM:

> 
> I ran into this.  It applies to Microsoft Office 2010 and Office 
> 2007.  I don't think it applies to Office 2003 with the 
> Compatibility Pack and the ODF Converter 4.0.
> 
> It seems that the ODF 1.1-aware Office applications provide a strict
> check on the manifest.xml schema.  (The rules about foreign elements
> and such have never been extended to the package and its manifest, 
> as far as I can tell.)
> 

I don't think that would have helped, because foreign elements need to be 
in a non-ODF namespace, right?

What would help is if we defined, for ODF Consumers, the required behavior 
for how to treat attributes that you don't understand, e.g., ignore, give 
a warning, treat as a fatal error, etc.  We really don't define any error 
handing constraints in the standard.

Another approach, that OOXML uses, is to have N+1 version documents 
declare how new attributes should be treated.  So the document itself says 
whether the new attribute must be understood, can safely be ignored, etc. 
Of course, it is hard to introduce a mechanism like that, because it is 
designed to benefit older applications, which by definition will not have 
support for any new meta-language for describing the effect of new 
attributes. 

It would be interesting to take an OOXML document from LO and add a 
unknown attribute to their manifest and see if Office 2010 treats it as a 
corrupt document also.  It might just be that they are very conservative 
in how they read document formats in general.

-Rob