Add new functionality now or later?

One thing we had to think about in TC45 when dealing with the national body comments was how to deal with requests for additional features or functionality. It's important to make sure at this stage to only fix issues in existing functionalities and that you don't put things into a standard that haven't been properly vetted.

For example, while I was surprised that ODF didn't have formulas in the first version of their specification even though spreadsheet formulas had already been so widely used in the industry, it wasn't as big of a deal that they don't have rich ink (handwriting) functionality as that's a bit newer in terms of office document integration and could probably use a bit more thinking in the ODF camp.

There's a great quote from Charles Antony Richard Hoare in his book "Essays in computing science":

When any new language design project is nearing completion, there is always a mad rush to get new features added before standardization. The rush is mad indeed, because it leads into a trap from which there is no escape. A feature which is omitted can always be added later, when its design and its implications are well understood.

This is why in TC45, we made changes where we felt we had the appropriate fixes and extensions to existing functionalities that were requested by National Bodies. We did this where we felt we had adequate time to think through the design. In other cases though, we had to push back and say that the suggestion was valid, but it was more appropriate to handle in future maintenance. Of course the final decision has to be made by the national bodies during the BRM.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2008
  Karellen, I don't know what you mean about the formula specification  not existing when we started to point out this flaw in ODF. I think Tim Bray from Sun was the first one to point out this shortcoming in ODF, and I followed. The formula's in Excel had been well defined for quite some time. OpenXML was submitted in draft form in December of 2005, and within a few short months the first draft of the formula piece was available for public preview. It's well defined and available for anyone to implement. Compare this to the SVG and XForms support in ODF where noone has been able to claim the fully implement it as it's so vaguely defined. -Brian

• Anonymous
  January 20, 2008
  This "Formula Specification" in MSOOXML has been claimed to be such an amazing addition, I had a look at it several months back now. Its nothing more than a dump of the Microsoft Excel help files, warts and all. Please read this post: "Mathematically Incorrect" http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/mathematically-.html It compares the Formula Spec issue in MSOOXML and in ODF, and it clearly shows how one is superior than the other when multiple vendors views are addressed to build a consensus within a standard. yk.

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2008
  The comment has been removed