RE: [office] Empty text:span elements

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Thomas,

I am not at all prepared to comment or speculate on something that an
implementation might be doing, but it is clear from the precedent of XHTML,
HTML, and the definition of ODF 1.1 that a <text:span /> tag is a text:span
element having no content.  And, with or without content, it has no
influence on content of the containing element that is not within the
text:span element.

 - Dennis

PS: What thrills me about your note is that I am so unfamiliar with ODF
details that I didn't know there was a text:span element at all.  Seeing
that there is, I am now completely baffled why the RDF metadata proposal
does not allow it for decoration of text with in-line RDF annotations in
precisely the way that <span> is used in the RDFa extensions to XHTML.
<text:span> is a wonderful feature for that, even though it is not as
generously usable as in the HTML cases.  I had supposed that this simple,
direct method for in-line annotation with metadata (a.k.a semantic markup)
was not supported because there was no span element.  Fooled myself!

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Zander [mailto:Thomas.t.Zander@nokia.com] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200901/msg00111.html
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 04:04
To: office
Subject: [office] ODF compatibility; empty ft:span

[ ... ]
 there is a
<text:p text:style-name="P2"><text:span text:style-name="T1"/></text:p>
where style "T1" sets the font size to 10pt.

From the spec 1.2-draft7;
  "The <text:span> element represents portions of text using a particular
  style. The content of this element is the text which uses that text
style."

[ ... ]