WG4's handling of DR-09-0248 - General: Removing the need for qualifiers on attributes in Strict

[Shawn Villaron]

Personally I'm a proponent of this change from a technical perspective.  That said, I don't know how we get this change made to the text in the next day or so ( which, I believe, is the target date to get finalized text to Rex ).  I just searched Part 1 and found over 16,000 instances of "w:"; even if we assume only 25% of those are related to this DR, that's a lot of changes ( plus a little over 1,400 in Part 4 ) to make.  

-----Original Message-----
From: MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) [mailto:eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 4:28 PM
To: 'e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org'
Subject: Re: WG4's handling of DR-09-0248 - General: Removing the need for qualifiers on attributes in Strict

> But without such note or note saying "do not yet implement OOXML 
> Strict, it will be substantially changed in next amendments" it will 
> be really bad to change to unqualified attributes after say one year. 
> That would mean that we will introduce to Strict as defined in IS 
> 29500 two backward incompatible changes -- firstly namespace change 
> and secondly after some time we will move WordprocessingML attributes 
> from this namespace.

True.  But suppose that we give up again next time.  Then such a note in the first amendment will be really harmful.

> Is it really necessary to include all 800 modified pages into amendment?
> Isn't it sufficient to just describe in general what is changed and 
> adapt schemas. Examples spread over the standard can be modified later 
> when next complete version of amended standard is published. I think 
> that concise amendment not showing all changes as change tracked text 
> is better then confusion created by constantly changing Strict schema.

The reason that WG4 in Copenhagen decided not to incorporate the change is the sheer amount of required changes.  You are now arguing that such changes would be nice but not mandatory.  Since the change in reply to
08-0012 is likely to have similar instructions (i.e., interpret all examples in Part 1 using different namespaces), you might have a point.

Usually, I am not willing to revisit decisions of WG4.  But if you and Mohamed are willing to provide change text to be incorporated and some people support the idea, WG4 might be willing to revisit this decision. 

Cheers,
Makoto