RE: [office] ODF 1.2 Single-Level Conformance and Law of Unintended Consequences

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

David,

Yes, that is exactly what it is about.

+1

 - Dennis 

PS: Agreed, the nicest ones are those that when ignored as foreign elements
have no deleterious effect on the conformant document that remains.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Faure [mailto:faure@kde.org] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200901/msg00139.html
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 11:10
To: office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office] ODF 1.2 Single-Level Conformance and Law of Unintended
Consequences

On Monday 19 January 2009, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
> Since current implementations do not (to my 
> knowledge) introduce foreign attributes and elements into documents, they 
> would not be impacted by this change.

By foreign, do you mean attributes and elements not defined by ODF?
Then I beg to differ, there are plenty of these, see below.

[ ... ]

> The point is that the ODF 1.2 metadata was designed to remove the need for

> foreign elements and attributes. That original extensibility feature was 
> not intended for extending the processing model of ODF, though in theory 
> it could be (mis)used for that purpose.  But in practice, the mechanism 
> has not been used at all.

I am very surprised by this; either I'm misunderstanding what this is about,
or the use of extensions isn't known enough by this TC.

Let me point out some examples:

* KWord can save a table style that points to a frame+paragraph style, it
does that by using the
koffice:frame-style-name and koffice:paragraph-style-name properties in the
style. This doesn't
create a huge interop problem since existing documents are rendered fine by
other implementations,
those properties are only used when creating new tables.

* KWord can define the behavior of a frame when a new page is created (for
DTP-like usage
where you might want a similar frame to be created on the next page at the
exact same position;
another one use case is a company logo in a page corner for instance).
This is done with koffice:frame-behavior-on-new-page in the frame style; and
here again it
only affects further editing, not rendering of a given document.

* OpenOffice has similar things, using the
xmlns:ooo="http://openoffice.org/2004/office"; namespace for instance.
or xmlns:ooow="http://openoffice.org/2004/writer"; or
xmlns:oooc="http://openoffice.org/2004/calc";.

Is this what "foreign elements and attributes" was about?

[ ... ]