Re: [office] compact syntax

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Lars,

Lars Oppermann wrote:
> Hi Bruce,
>
> Apropos compact syntax... Although I am currently not really fluent at 
> it - because we use the xml syntax in our spec - It may actually be 
> worth considering migrating the spec to use the compact syntax, as it 
> is indeed much more palatable. I don't think that this would impact 
> our nice automatic extraction process, which allows us to have a 
> common document for the schema and the specification text. After all, 
> converting between the two representations is an isomorphism.
>
> What do others think about this?
>
Well, I was reluctant when Svante first mentioned it to me but after 
thinking about the advantages (see below) I am on balance in favor of it.

The advantages that I see are:

1. Compactness: No real surprise but I think we have to realize that as 
the OpenDocument standard gets longer that readability becomes more and 
more of an issue. I don't know how many pages we will save but assuming 
it is 50+, I think it would be worth the effort.

2. General readability: Despite the fact that the OpenDocument standard 
will be read almost exclusively by standards geeks and implementers (not 
always the same group), I think anything that we can do to make it 
easier to read would be worth the effort. I must confess that I read 
markup (the angle bang stuff) almost as easily as I read clear text but 
I suspect that is more prevalent among old SGML/XML hands than the 
current generation working with XML markup.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Acting Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
Co-Editor, OpenDocument Format (OASIS, ISO/IEC 26300)