Re: [office-comment] Section 1.5 - implementations SHOULD use the namespace prefixes given.

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Monday 25 October 2004 17:24, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> [...]
> I also agree with Michael that disallowing people from using the default
> namespace will result in needless space bloat across the board.  I'd
> certainly prefer my OOXML application to use 
> 
> <styles xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:openoffice:xmlns:office:1.0">...
> 
> rather than
> 
> <office:styles
> xmlns:office="urn:oasis:names:tc:openoffice:xmlns:office:1.0">...

This is rather about 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<office:document-content xmlns:office="urn:oasis:names:tc:openoffice:xmlns:office:1.0" [...]>
  <office:styles>
     ....
  <office:automatic-styles>
     ....
etc.

I.e. the definition of the 'office' prefix (for namespace-aware parsers) is done only once.
-> not much bloat. It also avoids some name clashes which would happen with some
element names -- the point is that the OOXML specification defines many namespaces
(and prefixes), not just one. The elements from the various namespaces are really
intermixed, one can't just use a default namespace, most of the time.
Example:
  <office:text>
    <text:numbered-paragraph text:level="1" text:style-name="L1">
    ...
  </office:text>

And this (always using the same prefixes on saving) is what the implementers
of the spec (i.e. OpenOffice.org and KOffice) do currently, so I don't think 
mandating this would be a big problem. Yes, I can see which advantages
real namespace support brings (well, for those writing XML by hand....)
but the disadvantages seem bigger currently, as long as namespace-support
isn't that widespread in all the XML tools people use.

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).