MINUTES OF THE OASIS OPEN OFFICE XML FORMAT TC MEETING
DECEMBER, THE 22ND, 2003, 3PM GMT – 4:00PM GMT
Attendees
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Doug Alberg <>, Boeing
Michael Brauer <>, Sun Microsystems
Gary Edwards <>
David Faure <>
Paul Grosso <>, Arbortext
Daniel Vogelheim <>, Sun Microsystems
Acceptance of Minutes of the December, the 15th meeting
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- The attending TC members unanimously accepted the minutes.
Action Items
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- Daniel Vogelheim: Check quality of schemas created by schema
transformation tools.
- in progress
TC meetings
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The next con call takes place at January, the 5th. It will be chaired by
Daniel Vogelheim.
Discussion of Packages
----------------------
The TC continued the discussion about the URI schema for packages. It
clarified that references from files inside a package to files inside
the same package as well as to files outside the package are a
requirement, but that references from files outside a package to a file
inside a package are not an requirement. The TC further clarified that
office application might use packages without unzipping them as a whole,
while external applications might unzip them completely before
processing them. This means that both use cases have to be covered by
the URL schema used inside packages and should require no or little
adjustment of URLs only.
The TC agreed to use relative URL references as described in proposal 1
of http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200312/msg00029.html,
with the exception of the algorithm to resolve relative paths that is
contained in this proposal. Instead of this, relative-paths references
(as described in chapter 5 of RFC 2396) have to be resolved exactly as
they would be resolved if the whole package gets unzipped into a
directory at its current location. The base URI for resolving
relative-path references is the one that has to be used to retrieve the
(unzipped) file that contains the relative-path reference. All other
kinds of URI references, namely the ones that start with a protocol
(like http:), an authority (i.e //) or an absolute-path (i.e. /) do not
need any special processing. This especially means that absolute-paths
do not reference files inside the package, but within the hierarchy the
package is contained in, for instance the file system. URI references
inside a package may leave the package, but once they have left the
package, they never can return into the package or another one.
The TC further agreed to keep the specification of packages itself (that
is to use zip files, the manifest and encryption) unchanged and to use
the content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml and settings.xml streams as
described in the OOo specification.
The TC further discussed that KOffice and OpenOffice.org add a stream
that contains the package's MIME type to all packages. This stream is
always the first one within a package and allows file magic tools to
detect office documents. Since this stream is not described in the
OpenOffice.org specification, Michael Brauer will create a proposal for
it. He will further check which MIME types have to be used.
The TC further clarified that there is a package version of the Open
Office file format as well as a plain XML version. Both shall be
explicit mentioned in the file format specification.
Core Feature Set
----------------
The TC agreed to add an high level overview to the specification that
states the file format features that are expected to be supported by
typical office applications, like word processors or spreadsheets. A
core feature set for other kind of applications will not be specified.
New Action Items
----------------
Michael Brauer: Proposal for MIME type stream
Michael Brauer: Clarify MIME types to use for the Open Office format
Michael Brauer: Check whether plain XML file format is mentioned in the
specification.
Michael Brauer
OASIS Open Office XML format TC chair
