Re: [office] The Rule of Least Power

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

> at least not obviously yes.  The nature of standardization is making 
> choices, and it is not only respectable for an XML-based standard to 
> define a schema that disallows generalized XML extensions, it is the more 
> typical practice, in OASIS and in the W3C.  I'm not saying that there are 
> not open content model standards out there, but that they are in the 
> distinct minority.

I think that important is trend not status quo. And newer formats are
usually using open content model. One reason is that this can be
considered good practice and second is that open content models were
hard to express in W3C XML Schema, but as more and more standards use
RELAX NG for normative schema this easier to express.

For example, if I will use ODF as source for translation why should I be
disallowed to use ITS markup
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/)? AFAIK there is no direct
provision for this in ODF so I have to use custom attributes and
elements. But anyone else can view/print/edit this document by simply
ignoring ITS elements/attributes. Of course during editing those data
will be probably discarded by application which doesn't have support for
ODF+ITS -- but it is my responsibility to use toolchain which doesn't
break things.

You can argue that we should add ITS into ODF. Yes, we can and I think
it would be good idea. But we can find another dozen small markup
languages which will be good to add to ODF. This is simply impossible to
do with limited work and time resources this group has. Only thing we
can do is to define some policy how to handle such extensions and let
users to use ODF to its full power. If some extension usage shows as
widely adopted, it can became part of next version of ODF.

			Jirka

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