RE: [office-comment] Foreign elements and attributes

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Jesper,

Do these organizations allow their extended documents to leak into
interchange, under the assumption that there is no harm because use of the
feature will be ignored and cause no harm?

 - Dennis 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesper Lund Stocholm [mailto:4a4553504552@gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 22:43
To: ODF Comments List
Subject: Re: [office-comment] Foreign elements and attributes

2009/2/8  <robert_weir@us.ibm.com>:
> "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp> wrote on
> 02/06/2009 03:26:18 AM:

> We've had this feature in ODF since 2005.  But even though we've had many
> programs implement ODF, they have not used this feature.  In fact, all of
> the implementations I know of will simply strip out any foreign markup it
> encounters.  So if it is such a useful feature, how come in 3 1/2 years no
> one has bothered to find a use for it or to support it in their products?
> That's why I favor removing it from the ODF core.  Having it there just
> makes work for implementations to write code to handle it "just in case",
> even though no one currently uses the feature.

Actually, it happens every one in a while that I come across people
telling me, that they do in fact use the possibility in ODF of having
foreign elements and attributes in their documents to persist data and
whatnot. They use it internally in their organisations and extend
their tools to support their specific "flavor" of ODF extensions. So
even though you might be right that no "big" implementation of ODF
supports foreign elements and attributes, some organisations actually
use them anyway.

I agree with you that foreign elements are a interop nightmare (as is
everything not in the spec), but I do see them as an important tool
for developers and organisations wanting to use ODF and fit it to
their specific needs.

/Jesper Lund Stocholm
www.idippedut.dk
WG4

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