Regarding section 1.5 itself: The Open Office TC decided to use the term MAY rather than MUST (or will) at the mentioned location, because it wanted to ensure that the OpenDocument specification can be used by as many implementations as possible. This means that the format should also be usable by applications that only support a very small subset of the specification, as long as the information that these applications store can be represented using the OpenDocument format. A requirement that all foreign elements and attributes must be preserved actually would mean that some applications may not use the format, although the format itself would be suitable. Therefor, we leave it up to the implementations, which elements and attributes of the specification they support, and whether they preserve foreign element and attributes. Some more information about this can be found in appendix D of the specification.
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