RE: [office] Fw: [members] OASIS TC Call for Participation:OASIS UnitsML TC

["Mason, James David (MXM)" <masonjd@y12.doe.gov>]

I think that some sort of units sensitivity, which could be switched on or off, makes sense. Almost any page layout program, including OO Writer and MS Word, allows entry of distance units for page sizes, margins, paragraph indents, etc. (look at OO help under "Units, Converting"). Of course, that's data used by the program itself as opposed to data being acted on in a document.

 

I'll also pass on something I got from Jean Paoli at Microsoft: he was trying to explain why their XML specification was so much longer than ODF (ignoring such things as that theirs contains the user documentation as well as the basic specification). He claimed MS's specification, reflecting Excel, of course, was superior because it allowed for datatyping (from XSD) on the contents of spreadsheet cells. So the competition is sensitive to some sort of metadata that carries information that might be thought of as units. From our side, the OASIS RELAX NG ---ISO/IEC 19757 specification is also being extended for datatyping, so we ought to be able to carry the same sort of information as the MS XML.

 

Jim Mason