I am delighted to see this site and forum. I'm a big fan of OPC and I've been waiting until some of the review-only restrictions have been explicitly removed from the documents before I invested much deep analysis.
One niggling concern I have is whether it is appropriate to be speaking of OPC when we mean Packages in the context of the ECMA TC45 Base Document for the Office Open XML (OOX for short) Document Interchange Specification. The 7 pages in the Base Document are about 10% of what is covered as OPC. That leaves me wondering how much of OPC is being specified as part of OOX and how much will live separately, no matter that the OOX Packages are intended to be compatible with OPC. (I love the sharp statement on Compliance in the TC45 Base Document, and I am a loss to interpret it with regard to OPC or other ways of adding custom content to packages or repurposing packages without the usual OOX content.)
Let me turn it into questions:
1. Is OPC really meant here or are we talking only about OOX Packages here?
2. I notice typos and whatnot in Base Document section 9 on Packages. Is this a good place to submit comments, corrections, and questions?
Thanks for the comments. Regarding your question about OPC versus OOX, these are things that Ecma will decide during the standards process so I can't answer that. Perhaps somebody else can add some information about how that process will work?
Regarding typos in the Ecma draft, I'm not sure what the process is there either. But feel free to email me any specific errors you've noticed (dmahugh@microsoft.com) and I'll make sure they get to the right people. And meanwhile I'm going to see what I can learn about Ecma's process for public feedback.
- Doug
dmahugh: Thanks for the comments. Regarding your question about OPC versus OOX, these are things that Ecma will decide during the standards process so I can't answer that. Perhaps somebody else can add some information about how that process will work?
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Let me simplify the question. I'm assuming that what is in the ECMA draft as the Office Open XML Document Interchange Specification format is what has been proposed to ECMA by Microsoft. The rest of OPC doesn't seem to have been proposed for standardization.
Since the OPC are Microsoft's to propose, I guess a better question for here is whether OPC on this forum is about the overall OPC (a pretty rich specification) or just the OOX Package as described in the ECMA draft.
I think I will stick to the assumption that we mean OOX Package until I hear differently. (The reason for my being fussy is there is a pretty strong legal notice on the OPC 8.0 document.)
Although I chided Stephane here for appealing to facts not in evidence, we can now all catch up with the Open Packaging Conventions 0.85 specification, available along with an update to the XML Paper Specification (XPS) 0.85 and other materials. The latest are available for download here.
I haven't looked at the specifications yet, but Andy Simonds added some useful information in the announcement on his blog.
A Cautionary Note
It's still the case that the ECMA TC45 Office Open XML Document Interchange Specification (base document) makes no mention of OPC whatsoever in its description of OOX Packages. There's no mention of OPC and there are no references to OPC material in the OOX base document.
There are some tantalizing goodies, and some of the more-extensive explanatory information may be useful for understanding OOX Packages, but I would not presume to employ anything beyond what is specified for OOX for now.
I also haven't checked to see if anything has changed on the license front. The stated intention was to license OPC and XPS (with special provisions for XPS embedded in hardware) in much the same way as the current Office XML Reference Specifications are licensed.
I guess we have to stay tuned.