RE: [office-comment] Foreign elements and attributes

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

> From: Jesper Lund Stocholm [mailto:4a4553504552@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 22:43
> To: ODF Comments List
> Subject: Re: [office-comment] Foreign elements and attributes
> 
> 2009/2/8  <robert_weir@us.ibm.com>:
> > "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp> wrote on
> > 02/06/2009 03:26:18 AM:
> 
> > We've had this feature in ODF since 2005.  But even though we've had 
many
> > programs implement ODF, they have not used this feature.  In fact, all 
of
> > the implementations I know of will simply strip out any foreign markup 
it
> > encounters.  So if it is such a useful feature, how come in 3 1/2 
years no
> > one has bothered to find a use for it or to support it in their 
products?
> > That's why I favor removing it from the ODF core.  Having it there 
just
> > makes work for implementations to write code to handle it "just in 
case",
> > even though no one currently uses the feature.
> 
> Actually, it happens every one in a while that I come across people
> telling me, that they do in fact use the possibility in ODF of having
> foreign elements and attributes in their documents to persist data and
> whatnot. They use it internally in their organisations and extend
> their tools to support their specific "flavor" of ODF extensions. So
> even though you might be right that no "big" implementation of ODF
> supports foreign elements and attributes, some organisations actually
> use them anyway.
> 

If the ODF Standard stated that such extensions were not conformant, would 
these private, internal to an organization, extensions cease to occur?  Or 
will it still continue?  I'd imagine it would still continue. 

I think it is a question of control.  Users like extensions when they 
control them, such as when they are the originators of extensions, or when 
their applications use extensions at their request.  But users do not like 
extensions when an application uses them without their knowledge or 
consent.

-Rob