Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up lateish, call with Vojtech. Dug through the mail, until finally, in the afternoon - got to a little Android hacking; fun.
In connection with the somewhat irritating MS Office 2010 issue I mentioned last Tuesday, I was somewhat startled to see Rob Weir change tack to a new attitude about standards:
I have no wish for the ODF standard, like the US Constitution or the Bible, being used as an excuse to justify stupidity. ODF is a specification for document exchange. If you are using it in a way that decreases interoperability then you really need to step back and ask yourself if your literal interpretation really makes sense.
Of course, amazingly the implication is that it would be 'stupidity' to follow the spec. and produce documents that are valid ODF 1.2 (as LibreOffice 3.5, and the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 pre-release builds do.
Then we have this gem:
If a program does not meet user expectations then it is a bug. If you want to be compatible with Microsoft Office then you need to play by their rules. ...
In any case Seeing responses like this from LibreOffice makes be very optimistic about the future of Apache OpenOffice. Whatever the cause, the fact that LibreOffice ships with this problem shows either a woefully inadequate QA program, or total indifference to real world requirements. Even testing a single LibreOffice document in Office 2007 would have shown this bug. Is that too much to expect?
This is really a deep & rich lasagne of irony, I'm really trying to work out which bit is most tasty, could it be - first the aggressive, purist, open-standards champion advocating deliberatly writing non-conforming output, and making ODF 'play by' Microsoft's rules ? Or - could it be the fact that (apparently) the TC chair hadn't bothered to validate or test changes to his standard in 'real world' office suites, but rather prefers to deflect attention at 'woefully inadequate QA' to a single implementor: LibreOffice. Or finally could it be that he hasn't noticed that his own Apache OpenOffice implementation actually does the same thing. Hard to choose really; mystifying; checked colour of the moon to make sure: apparently not blue.
Of course, personally, I'd love us to have a good solution that ensures maximum interoperability while conforming, no doubt we'll find some way to work out what that is in the end. It is clearly not just as simple as removing that single version attribute: forwards compatibility is somewhat tough - but starting with backwards-compatibility is prolly sensible. Since ODF 1.2 is not completely backwards compatible with 1.1, knowing what the version is is rather useful for correct interpretation.
Emily & Sarah around to read stories, share dinner & sit up late to chat - lovely to spend time with them.

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Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2012-01-18: Wednesday