Re: [office-comment] shorter XML representations for the values ?

[Jérôme Bouat <jerome.bouat@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello,


> One solution for the boolean issue would be to harmonize
> our office:value-type attribute with XML Schema datatypes,
> at least for the common overlap in types.
> XML Schema's boolean type allows lexical forms to be one of:
> true, false, 1, 0.   That would allow a more compact form.

Do you know if the next specification will take this efficient boolean values representation into account ?


>  > By using a base 62 representation (symbols by increasing weight :
>  > 0-9 letters, a-z letters, A-Z letters), the value of the
>  > "office:value" attribute becomes "z3wBXdvb".
> (...)
>
> That would add considerable complexity on ODF processors,
> (...)
>  The nice thing about using XML Schema datatypes is
> that they are well known and supported in tools.
> In particular, validating parsers can apply additional constraints.
> So a use could easily write a script,
> using just off-the-shelf XML tools,
> to confirm that all cells in an ODF spreadsheet have values between -50 and 1000.
> But if values are encoded like "z3wBXdvb"
> then it would require custom coding to make sense of that value.
>
> One way to think of this:  adherence to well-known standards
> provides an efficiency of its own,
> in terms of understanding, compatibility with existing tools, etc.
> But it might not be the optimal in terms of run-time performance.
> An alternative here -- which we've talked about before -- would be
> to have a canonical binary encoding of ODF.

I don't think that standardisation is the end of the innovation. If you have enough time to make the "off-the-shelf" tools compliant with the new specification, then a shorter representation of values would be a benefit for everyone.

I don't think the binary encoding would be a solution for long term storage. As you said, XML provide benefits like validation, etc.

I think a shorter value representation is a good trade-off between the use of the generic XML language/tools and the need of efficiency.

If you think about the increasing cost of the energy, then a more compact XML would be a benefit in the data centers, desktop computers, etc.


Regards.