In the Sky

Welcome to Blue Sky Office, the all-things-for-all-people interoperable solution using all standard office-productivity document formats -- FTW.

Blue Sky Office (aka BSO^†) is provided as Universally-Friendly Open-source software (UFOss), developed entirely in PLITS.

The BSO representations of office-productivity documents are all files with the .bso extension.  These may be of any standardized format.  Blue Sky Office discovers the format by inspection of the file and does the right thing.

On the Ground

Blue Sky Office is not intended to be implemented.  Blue Sky Office is fantasy.  The value of Blue Sky Office is in providing exemplary illustrations.  Every example in terms of Blue Sky Office behavior is merely a plausible story.  It suggests what some office-productivity software operations might be and what the user of the software might see that involves the file-format representation details under consideration.  The provision being illustrated is important and its support is expected in accordance with the specification where the BSO examples are offered.  BSO does not dictate the way the provision must be supported.  It simply demonstrates a possible satisfaction of the provision.

Blue Sky Office examples necessarily include incidental details in order to demonstrate how essential provisions of a document format might be supported.  The examples are not prescriptive.  Any other means for satisfying the provision is acceptable.

Application

Blue Sky Office is used to illustrate cases in analysis and specification for the RCT: Repaired Change-Tracking ODF 1.2 Extension Profile.  Although the RCT extension has normative requirements concerning the support of particular ODF 1.2 and extension provisions, those requirements determine what provisions shall be supported and how they are expressed in the document-file format.  RCT provisions are not so explicit as to prescribe how a consumer honors the requirements, what users can view and manipulate, and what a producer must have done.   BSO examples demonstrate what an RCT provision entails.  The examples do not limit how a provision is available and what is presented to operators of RCT-compliant software so long as the explicit requirements are satisfied.

BSO usage is can be extended to other provisions for OpenDocument documents apart from the needs for RCT.  BSO is also employable in interoperability assessment of profiles for other formats, such as OOXML and ePub.

^† Note: In common with many TLAs, BSO has been given many meanings.  To differentiate among the multitude of those, keep Bright Shiny Object in mind.

0.03 2017-06-14 20:21 -0700