Given the scope, breadth and depth of the specification, including the numerous passages marked as "informative" only, the conformance criteria here seem few and vague.
Specify exact conformance criteria, possibly for different levels (minimal, full etc.) and/or for specific subsets of the specification and/or from the perspective of different categories of implementing software (visual editors, renderers, batch filters, pass-through systems etc.)
f.e.g. Profiling could be a proper solution
Part 1, section 2.5
ed
Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment DE-0148 (Modified: 2008-01-08) Agreed; the conformance criteria has been modified to address the concept of conformance classes for defined profiles. For more information on these changes, see the response to JP-0027, JP-0028, and JP-0029, included here for reference: Some National Bodies expressed a need to identify more clearly how developers can implement only those features of the specification that were important to them; for example, many implementers only want to implement word processing documents, and do not wish to implement spreadsheets or presentations. The following changes allow developers to build a conforming implementation that supports some subset of the features of DIS 29500: Modify Part 1, §2.4 and §2.5, as follows: 2.4. Document Conformance Document conformance is purely syntactic; it involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above. A conforming document shall conform to the schema (Item 1 above) and any additional syntax constraints (Item 2). The document shall be of type Wordprocessing, Spreadsheet, or Presentation. The document character set shall conform to the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646, with either the UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding form, as required by the XML 1.0 standard. Any XML element or attribute not explicitly included in this Standard shall use the extensibility mechanisms described by Parts 4 and 5 of this Standard. Each Part of this multi-part standard has its own conformance clause. The term conformance class is used to disambiguate conformance within different Parts of this multi-part standard. This Part defines the following document conformance classes: WML, if the document is a conforming document of type Wordprocessing. SML, if the document is a conforming document of type Spreadsheet. PML, if the document is a conforming document of type Presentation. [Note: Other document conformance classes could be defined in the future. end note] 2.5. Application Conformance Application conformance incorporates both syntax and semantics; it is purely syntactic; it also involves items only items- 1 , and 2, and 3 in §2.3 above. A conforming consumer shall not reject any conforming documents of at least one document conformance class. the document type (§4) expected by that application. A conforming producer shall be able to produce conforming documents of at least one document conformance class . A conforming application shall treat the information in Office Open XML documents in a manner consistent with the semantic definitions given in this Specification. An application’s intended behavior need not require that application to process all of the information in an Office Open XML document. However, the information that it does process shall be processed in a manner that is consistent with the semantic definitions given in this Specification. A conforming producer should not use the deprecated features contained in Annex X, “Selected Transitional Migration Features,” except when migrating existing binary documents into the Office Open XML file formats. [Note: This note illustrates the third bullet above. Conforming applications might serve various functions. Examples include a viewer, an editor, and a back-end processor. Here is an illustration of how the third bullet applies to each of those examples: If a conforming viewer supports a given feature, then when it displays information using that feature, it respects the semantics of that feature as described in the Specification. If a conforming editor supports a given feature, then when it provides its user with an interface for manipulating information using that feature, it respects the semantics of that feature as described in the Specification. If a conforming back-end processor supports a given feature, then it when it transforms or assembles information involving that feature, it respects the semantics of that feature as described in the Specification. end note] This Part defines the following application conformance classes: WML, if the application is a conforming application that is a consumer or producer of documents having conformance class WML. SML, if the application is a conforming application that is a consumer or producer of documents having conformance class SML. PML, if the application is a conforming application that is a consumer or producer of documents having conformance class PML. Append the following paragraph to Part 2, §6, “General Description”: Each Part of this multi-part standard has its own conformance clause. The term conformance class is used to disambiguate conformance within different Parts of this multi-part standard. This Part has only one conformance class, OPC (that is, Open Packaging Conventions). An application implementing this Specification is defined to be of conformance class OPC if it satisfies all the conformance conditions listed in this specification.
While it is marked as an editorial proposal it has technical implications which can be interpreted as similar to the French proposal to split Open XML into a core part and an extension part. The idea to specify conformity levels of the specification should be more discussed. In certain use cases it might be sufficient to implement only portions of the DIS 29500 standard that is extraordinary large (as you know).
Also regarding the coverage of incomplete implementations with potential patent licensing and a possible additional inclusion of the Microsoft BIFF specification into the standard a model with conformance levels could help to structure and prioritize the standard.
@arebenti
Actually OOXML has a fairly usefull conformance clause (compared with ODF) that already allows partial implementations as long as the implemtation and or documentation around it says that it is a partial implementation and states (generally) what it supports or what it doesn’t support.
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Strangely enough the vague conformance clause in ODF would allow you to call any arbitrary file an Opendocument file.
Very similar to GB-0027