Re: [office] The Rule of Least Power

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

> However, I could give you equally plausible extension attributes which 
> would require entirely different processing, and in fact would lead to 
> horribly corrupted documents if the same processing rules were 
> indiscriminately applied.

Indeed. But even if ODF will use the simplest policy that application
should strip unknown extension elements/attributes this problem will be
eliminated.

> Has anyone done this work already?  I'm surprised there is not a 
> well-known standard for expressing such editing semantics.  I think most 
> of my concerns would be answered if we had a standard vocabulary for 
> indicating for extensions things like volatile="true", 
> preserveOnCopy="false", etc.

I think that this task is very complex and AFAIK the completely general
solution leads to NP-complete problem. Probably nothing what anyone
would like to implement in his office application.

Of course, the most typical cases could be handled by rules you propose.

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