OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

Dear TC members,

as agreed in the last call, below are a few examples that use namespace 
prefixes in attribute values.

The I think the most important one is the W3C "CURIE Syntax 1.0" 
specification:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-curie-20080506

It is a last call working draft and I don't think it will get a 
"Recommendation" early enough to be used in ODF 1.2. But I think we 
should consider to replace the existing usages of QNAMEs (we call them 
namespacesTokens), in attribute values in the ODF 1.2 specification with 
CURIEs for ODF 1.3.

Another example is the XSLT specification. It uses QNAMEs for multiple 
purposes:

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116#qname

One example where QNAMEs are used in XSLT are extension functions:

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116#section-Extension-Functions

Best regards

Michael


-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
Sun Microsystems GmbH             Nagelsweg 55
D-20097 Hamburg, Germany          michael.brauer@sun.com
http://sun.com/staroffice         +49 40 23646 500
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS

Sitz der Gesellschaft: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1,
	   D-85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas Schroeder, Wolfgang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering

Could you please give a simple example? Are you talking about the
values being qualified, or are you talking about something that looks
like a namespace for an attribute.

wt

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 7:02 AM, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02
- Hamburg 

2008/5/16 Warren Turkal 

It's a good thing to avoid, because prefixes
are of course not themselves significant, and software can change
the actual prefixes, and sometimes does.

An attribute value declared in a W3C XML Schema to be a QName
or a list of QNames may well have prefixes changed inside it
automatically, as necessary (e.g. XQuery and XSLT 2 support this
idea), but of course most software isnt' Schema-aware.

Above from a knowledgable source in W3C


On which basis I'd advise against QNAMES in attribute values

regards


-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk

Dave Pawson
> On which basis I'd advise against QNAMES in attribute values

But what, exactly, would you do INSTEAD?  We need a reasonable alternative.  It would be absurd to embed whole IRIs inside the attribute value containing the formula.  We could have a "formula-language=" attribute to an IRI, for every formula; that might be 'clean' from that perspective, but that would make the format painful to use in practice.  If formula-language="..." is a namespace value, there's no real difference than the current approach.  They're very doubtful as prefixes of the entity names, or of the attribute names, because they're always formulas (though perhaps this is the best alternative).  We could forbid alternative languages (which is what failing to spec this issue would lead to), but that makes no sense; existing docs already find this capability useful.  The logic of what we're trying to do leads to, well, what's currently spec'ed.

This is _already_ current practice; OpenOffice.org _already_ does this, as do I believe all OpenDocument implementations.  In general, I believe standards should codify existing practice, unless there's a good reason to otherwise AND a reasonable alternative.  Indeed, we should be wary of fixes that have never been tried in an implementation; often the fix is worse than the disease :-).

But if you think it's a bad idea, what would you do instead?

--- David A. Wheeler

David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Dave Pawson
>> On which basis I'd advise against QNAMES in attribute values
> 
> But what, exactly, would you do INSTEAD?  We need a reasonable alternative.  It would be absurd to embed whole IRIs inside the attribute value containing the formula.  We could have a "formula-language=" attribute to an IRI, for every formula; that might be 'clean' from that perspective, but that would make the format painful to use in practice.  If formula-language="..." is a namespace value, there's no real difference than the current approach.  They're very doubtful as prefixes of the entity names, or of the attribute names, because they're always formulas (though perhaps this is the best alternative).  We could forbid alternative languages (which is what failing to spec this issue would lead to), but that makes no sense; existing docs already find this capability useful.  The logic of what we're trying to do leads to, well, what's currently spec'ed.
> 
> This is _already_ current practice; OpenOffice.org _already_ does this, as do I believe all OpenDocument implementations.  In general, I believe standards should codify existing practice, unless there's a good reason to otherwise AND a reasonable alternative.  Indeed, we should be wary of fixes that have never been tried in an implementation; often the fix is worse than the disease :-).

Actually, the ODF specification itself uses already namespace prefixes 
in attribute values, so what OOo does is simply what is specified in ODF 
itself.

Michael

> 
> But if you think it's a bad idea, what would you do instead?
> 
> --- David A. Wheeler
> 
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-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
Sun Microsystems GmbH             Nagelsweg 55
D-20097 Hamburg, Germany          michael.brauer@sun.com
http://sun.com/staroffice         +49 40 23646 500
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS

Sitz der Gesellschaft: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1,
	   D-85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas Schroeder, Wolfgang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering

Warren Turkal wrote:
> Could you please give a simple example? Are you talking about the
> values being qualified, or are you talking about something that looks
> like a namespace for an attribute.

I'm talking about qualified values. An example could be an element

 where c is a namespace prefix.

Background is the discussion we had in the last TC call regarding the 
use of namespace prefixes on the table:formula attribute. I've promised 
to post a few examples where namespace prefixes are also evaluated 
within attributes values.

Michael

> 
> wt
> 
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 7:02 AM, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02
> - Hamburg 

Michael Brauer :
> as agreed in the last call, below are a few examples that use namespace 
> prefixes in attribute values.

Thanks!  I will add those references as annotations to the OpenFormula spec.
The annotations won't be included in the "official" spec, but by being in the
annotated version, hopefully we can stave off having to re-answer the
question again and again.

--- David A. Wheeler