Re: [office-comment] Section 1.5 - implementations SHOULD use thenamespace prefixes given.

[Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>]

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 09:03, David Faure wrote:
> On Monday 25 October 2004 16:53, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> > David,
> > 
> > do you know an application that actually could be able to support the 
> > OASIS Open Office format, but does not support namespaces?
> Yes - KOffice :-)
> 
> We currently look for "office:styles" etc., not for "the element named prefix:styles
> where prefix was associated with urn:oasis:names:tc:openoffice:xmlns:office:1.0",
> as proper namespace support would mandate.
> This is due to the lack of namespace support in Qt's DOM implementation.
> And I believe that doing it by hand in KOffice itself would make the reading much slower.
> 
> So I would actually like it very much if the specification could request that
> the given prefixes are used by everyone.
> 
> I also assumed that many hand-made scripts relied on the current prefixes,
> but I have no proof of that.

I appreciate this implementation difficulty (I assume Qt DOM is purely
1.0, then), but I really think it's a bad idea to abuse the namespace
REC by mandating prefixes.  A suggestion of prefix is OK, but not a
mandate.  Namespaces are far from perfect, but if we claim to use them,
we should use them rightly.  Otherwise just leave off using namespaces
entiry.  After all, how likely is anyone to embed OOXML within other
vocabularies?  We could stipulate that extension and foreign elements
*within* OOXML should be in namespaces, and that simply means that
implementations that do not support namespaces will not support
extensions, which is probably a fair compromise.

I also agree with Michael that disallowing people from using the default
namespace will result in needless space bloat across the board.  I'd
certainly prefer my OOXML application to use 

<styles xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:openoffice:xmlns:office:1.0">...

rather than

<office:styles
xmlns:office="urn:oasis:names:tc:openoffice:xmlns:office:1.0">...


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
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