Hi Doug,
On 02/02/09 03:14, Doug Mahugh wrote:
> Thanks for the info, Rob. Yes, that does clear up why this is on the table.
Rob is correct. The background of the proposal are the changed OASIS
requirements. We are discussing the conformance proposal since end of
September 2008. I only paused its discussion in order to make a better
progress on the 5 other proposals we agreed to take for ODF 1.2.
>
> I still don't understand the intent of removing and/or deprecating support for foreign elements, however, which seems to be a direction that has only come up very recently. There are a growing number of organizations building custom solutions around those sorts of extensibility mechanisms, which allow for the best of both worlds: standards-based formatting markup for use by desktop apps (word processors, etc.), and custom markup for non-visual processing by custom systems.
>
> I won't belabor the reasons I think this is a good approach, but for anyone who's interested, here are a few blog posts with more information on this topic:
> http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/03/03/microformats-and-open-xml.aspx
> http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/03/26/custom-xml-markup.aspx
> http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/05/19/custom-schemas-revisited.aspx
>
> I think we all agree that introduction of foreign elements can cause interoperability problems, but I'd rather see us fix those problems than give up on custom schema support altogether. The use of class attributes in microformat-tagged HTML and the use of WordprocessingML's customXml element are both examples of approaches that allow rigorous standards-based validation without foregoing the benefits of custom schema support. It would be great if ODF 1.2 could offer similar capabilities, in my opinion.
Please see my reply to Stephen on this. Where foreign elements are used
to embed information from other schemas, ODF provides the option to use
either XForms or the new RDFa and RDF/XML metadata features.
Best regards
Michael
>
> - Doug
>
>