The ‘The markup editor can attempt to persist these ignored elements and attributes when a saving markup document, despite the editor’s inability to recognize the purpose of these ignored elements and attributes.’ requirement is dangerously too lax. It paves the way to information erasure from documents by some conformant applications, giving little chances, and no warranty at all, to users of two different conformant editors E1 and E2 to safely round-trip their documents. As such, it is a major setback for the interoperability objectives of the OOXML specification.We understand that some classes of conformant applications, and especially of consumers that are not producers, must be relaxed on many constraints on their output (the first of which being to produce OOXML documents). However, as far as ‘editor’ in the OOXML text refers to what is generally understood to be an editor (note that no explicit definition has been provided), editors should not be authorized to erase any part of the underlying documents, beyond the erasures (and other modifications) that could be directly traced to a user edition.

Put more constraints on compliant editors, so as to fulfill the announced objectives of first-class interoperability. Specifically in this case, do not allow conformant editors to erase information from OOXML documents, even from parts of the said documents that the said editors are not able to interpret, unless this can be traced to an explicit user edition action.

page 9, line 32 Part 5, Section 8.1 Terminology

te

Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment FR-0556 (Modified: 2008-01-02) Agreed; this comment has been addressed as a side-effect of resolving comment JP-0081, which adds a Conformance clause to Part 5.