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Subject: Re: [office] The Rule of Least Power
Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz> wrote on 02/11/2009 05:09:21 PM: > 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. > Levels of understanding will vary. I see this as being of broad applicability. Certainly the practice of the W3C has not been one of allowing generalized use of namespaced extensions in every standard. And the argument that "XML allows extensibility, so every XML standard should allow such extensibility" is silly. Certainly, ODF is also Unicode, and Unicode has a mechanism for adding extensions. Should we then allow PUA characters in ODF? ODF uses ZIP, and ZIP allows extension compression algorithms. Should those then be allowed? The answer is obviously no, or at least not obviously yes. The nature of standardization is making choices, and it is not only respectable for an XML-based standard to define a schema that disallows generalized XML extensions, it is the more typical practice, in OASIS and in the W3C. I'm not saying that there are not open content model standards out there, but that they are in the distinct minority. -Rob
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