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

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Warren Turkal wrote:
> I am going to use the terminology from the XML namespace standard[1]
> in this post.
> 
> I see no harm in allowing different qualified names for a given
> namespace name. It's XML after all. If your tool so simple that it
> doesn't understand XML namespaces, then your tool shouldn't be marked
> compliant with an XML-based standard. Also, people who understand XML
> would be required to think about qualified names in ODF documents
> differently than other XML documents if we require the qualified name
> to be some fixed string.

I totally agree. Actually, our charter states as one requirement that

"it [ODF] must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language 
(XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,"

So, an ODF application has to support namespaces.

> 
> I think that the ODF standard should indicate which qualified names
> correspond to which namespace names for the purposes of interpreting
> the standard. However, the ODF standard should not require that
> certain qualified names be used in all ODF documents.

That's what we say in section 1.3 Namespaces: "Table 1 lists the 
namespaces that are defined by the OpenDocument schema and their default 
prefixes." Or at least what we try to say.

So, there is a prefix that we use in the specification and in the 
schema, because without that, we could neither define a (namespace 
aware) schema nor would the specification be interpretable. But it is a 
feature of XML Namespaces and RNG that one can use other namespace 
prefixes than those used in the schema, and I personally see absolutely 
no reason why we should add restriction to ODF here. In particular, all 
ODF application must have implemented namespace support already, so 
allowing other prefixes than "of" for formulas really should not cause 
any issues.


Michael

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