Give me my drawing back! - The Document Foundation Wiki

Progressive development of file-formats
Nobody reinvents a wheel from scratch
It is useful to know the release dates of different versions when doing
reverse-engineering
Two subsequent versions of the same file-format will have many things in
common
Design parser to be able to parse lower and higher versions
Opened version conditions
Guard assumptions by exceptions and be verbose in debug mode
Try to parse lower or higher version using the existing parser
Fix issues as they appear
Importance of a small number of reference documents covering many
features
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