Re: [office] Namespace 'of' for formula expressions

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Eike Rathke:
> Pardon? Sorry, I'm not sure I got that question correctly. If you're
> referring whether aliasing the alias to arbitrary different names should
> be allowed: I don't think so. IMHO it should be a fixed value for
> simplicity, so yes, "of" would be the required namespace alias.

Strictly speaking, from an XML point of view the "of" namespace alias could be any name; "aklfjsajfslkf:" would be fine as long as the matching namespace definition gave the same OpenFormula namespace.

BUT: I think we _should_ limit or strongly encourage, the namespace alias to be "of" exactly, at least when it's inside an OpenDocument document.  The reason is that there are a lot of simple tools/libraries that don't handle namespaces exactly "correctly".  If we always use "of:", then the simple tools will work.... just grab the strings, and yank off the "of:" in front.  We want people to be able to develop simple tools to extract data from a document, and making that prefixed fixed simplifies their lives.

There is the problem of nesting; I suppose we could change it to "should", if someone believes that's important.

--- David A. Wheeler