Christopher,
Interesting question... maybe I've been too indoctrinated by MS, but my poor lil mind can't comprehend how a word processor could be written to display any and all documents created by future versions... considering that one of the main points of a software upgrade is new functionality. This implies new objects, or new ways of displaying objects, which weren't available in the previous software version(s). It strikes me as similar to expecting MS Paint to open animation files.
On the bright side, I've never had trouble opening a PREVIOUS version document in OpenOffice... once that pre-2.0beta file format naming switch was made, anyway :) This is something I HAVE struggled with, far too often, with MS products... backward compatibility. Eurgh.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/backward_compatible.html
- Naomi
I would second what Naomi said *if* you assume that the goal is to *correctly* display the content of future file versions.
It seems to me that it *would* be possible to provide this kind of future-proofing if the rules were set out like html or even rtf.
The idea behind these formats is that if an application (browser or word processor) doesn't know what to do with a particular tag, it is supposed to just ignore it. This allows the file to be opened and at least some of the content to be extracted.
Left to their own devices I imagine that the Sun engineers would have done just exactly that. However, the odt format is the result of industry collaboration to produce a universal, open format for adoption by the OSI. This necessitated certain changes to the basic structure of the format which rendered such future-proofing impossible.
So while this could be seen as a... what?.. betrayal?... of the original intent, I think it was more of a strategic decision to make this change now, relatively early in the game in order to gain a stronger footing for the OpenDocument format. I believe the plan is to release add-on filters for older versions of OOo so that they can open the new format as well.
Rod
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