Re: [office] Placement of automatic styles definition

[Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>]

Hi David,

David Faure wrote:
> Both document-content (content.xml) and document-styles (styles.xml) can hold automatic styles.
> The specification says more particularly, though, that
> document-styles contains "[...] automatic styles used in the styles themselves"
> and
> document-content contains "automatic styles used in the content".
> 
> But is it allowed to define all automatic styles in document-styles (styles.xml)?

I don't think that this should be allowed. The idea behind having two 
automatic styles sections is that the styles.xml can be exchanged 
without any impact on the content.xml. Or to be more precise: The 
automatic styles defined in the styles.xml are the ones that belong to 
the content of master styles only, while the ones specified in the 
content.xml are the ones that belong to the content of the document 
itself. If for instance a master page has to be exchanged, then this can 
be done by rewriting styles.xml only. If the automatic styles of 
styles.xml contain the ones for master styles only, then the automatic 
styles of the current master styles can be created from scratch. It is 
not required to take automatic styles that are referenced from the 
content into account.

> 
> For reading a document it doesn't make much difference (one has to start with styles.xml anyway),

If we assume that all common and master styles are inserted into the 
document while reading styles.xml, one can through away the automatic 
styles after reading styles.xml.

> and for generating a document it can be much simpler than having to iterate over
> the contents twice, once to generate automatic styles and once to write out the contents
> (which is the only way, if the automatic styles have to be _before_ the contents in the same XML)

That's true.

> 
> Please let me know if it's OK to define all automatic-styles in styles.xml.
> 

Best regards

Michael