Comment on 1.6 of 26300

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

I have no idea why that passage is in ODF 1.0/1.1 (before Errata changes to it).  

My only suspicion is that there was a desire allow arbitrary white space for pretty-formatting of XML and that was thought important.  The clauses in 1.6 are designed to avoid any situation where such white space would be considered not conformant ODF and also to avoid it being taken as text.  

The rule probably goes back to the beginning of ODF when the proposal was DTD based. 

Since there is no DTD, I offered the replacement passage that appealed to the RNG Data Model to have the same effect, under the assumption that implementations are based on the schema, whether or not based on schema validation.

I am not attached to any of this.  But to produce another Errata on it for any of ODF 1.0/1.1/1.2 at OASIS there has to be some assurance that removing the provision (in any of its forms) will not invalidate any conforming documents and consumers.

 - Dennis   

I would not be surprised that custom XML processing was also done.  It was learned, for example, that META-INF/manifest.xml had unusual parsers for ODT documents and namespaces were not handled well.

I haven't retested that for current releases, but you might find this report interesting:
<https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/trunk/odf12/NameSpaceResilience/NameSpaceResilience-Results.htm>.

There are more details here:
<https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/trunk/odf12/NameSpaceResilience/>
with a description of the files here:
<https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/trunk/odf12/NameSpaceResilience/NameSpaceResilience.txt>.



-----Original Message-----
From: eb2mmrt at gmail.com [mailto:eb2mmrt at gmail.com] On Behalf Of MURATA Makoto
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 08:47 PM
To: dennis.hamilton at acm.org
Cc: SC 34/WG 6 mailing list
Subject: Re: Comment on 1.6 of 26300

[ ... ]

When I read ODF 1.0, I thought that the section about whitespace
is useless and should be simply deleted.  I still think so.

I do not understand why ODF should say something about
behaviours of XML processors.  I also think that most ODF
implementations will not rely on RELAX NG or NVDL validation
at run time and thus specifying whitespace processing in terms
of validation is also useless.  ODF application programs may
or may not remove some whitespace text chunks when there are
sibling elements.  I do not understand why the ODF spec should tie
the hands of implementors here.  The choice (i.e., remove or
not to  remove) has nothing to do with interoperability of ODF documents.

Regards,
Makoto

[ ... ]