Office Open XML
2 Conformance
2.2 Application Conformance

2.2 Application Conformance

Application conformance incorporates both syntax and semantics:

  • A conforming consumer shall not reject any conforming documents of at least one document conformance class.

  • 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 ISO/IEC 29500. 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 ISO/IEC 29500.

[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 Standard.

  • 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 Standard.

  • If a conforming back-end processor supports a given feature, then when that processor transforms or assembles information involving that feature, that processor respects the semantics of that feature as described in the Standard.

end note]

This Part of ISO/IEC 29500 defines the following application conformance classes:

  • WML Strict, if the application is a conforming application that is a consumer or producer of documents having conformance class WML Strict.

  • SML Strict, if the application is a conforming application that is a consumer or producer of documents having conformance class SML Strict.

  • PML Strict, if the application is a conforming application that is a consumer or producer of documents having conformance class PML Strict.

Conformance can also involve the use of application descriptions; see 2.3 for details.

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