Re: [office] The Rule of Least Power

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

> "When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between 
> using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for 
> expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores 
> tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. 
> The 'Rule of Least Power' suggests choosing the least powerful language 
> suitable for a given purpose."

I think that my understanding of intent of authors of this document is
very different from you. I don't think that this TAG finding is
discouraging use of general extensibility mechanism. My understanding is
that rule of least power prefers markup like:

<p>foo</p>

over

<p>
  <r>
    <t>foo</t>
  </r>
</p>

You can find another TAG findings related to XML versioning and
extensibility strategies:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-compatibility-strategies#dt-extensible

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-xml

So I don't think that picking up some arbitrary TAG finding is a good
argument agains/in favour of general extensibility.

			Jirka

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