Re: [office-comment] Foreign elements and attributes

[Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

May I suggest that there is an alternative to the current draft that 
would satisfy more stakeholders and be less work?

It is to ban foreign elements, but allow foreign attributes, with only a 
single conformance class.

This seems to me to meet the following objectives:

* It prevents extensions where instead of the ODF markup for some data, 
some completely extra-standard representation is used.  Because ODF has 
so many holes in other places to allow vendor or user defined metadata, 
this requirement can be satisified with such a broad brush, and we don't 
need to look at all the other holes. This seems to meet (Bob Jolliffe's) 
government requirements?

* It does not require coding changes to OpenOffice or the KOffice 
drawing application that was mentioned. This seems to meet Novell's 
requirements.

* It meets  druthers for a single standard. This seems to meet Novell's 
requirements.

* It allows vendor- and task specific metadata and is backwards 
compatible with ODF 1.0 and 1.1.  I think this is good enough for my 
(industry's) requirements.

* It allows the workaround for system integrators who would have liked 
to have had foreign elements for wrappers and so on, because the 
workaround is available of using foreign attributes on existing ODF 
elements (such as section elements.) This is not ideal but workable. I 
think it is good enough for my (industry's) requirements.
 
In other words, the choice that forced the compromise of two conformance 
classes (i.e. extensions or no extensions) is
a false choice. There is the intermediate position of not allowing 
foreign attributes, but allowing foreign elements.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe