stylesWithEffects / musings ?

Wed Feb 17 01:50:55 CET 2010

Hi Alex,

Yes, that namespace is "one of ours" (SC34's), and its semantics have not been redefined.  Rather, it has a couple of Office 2010 namespaces (see 2010 in the namespace strings) that are designated as "Ignorable" as covered in Part 3, Section 10.1.1.  As stated in that section, "During processing, if a markup consumer encounters an element or attribute in a non-understood and ignorable namespace, the markup consumer shall treat that element or attribute as if it did not exist and shall not generate an error."

That part exists to enable Word 2010 to "re-hydrate" custom styles that have been defined in Word 2010 (including new Word 2010 text effects), after an editing round-trip through an MCE-aware implementation that doesn't know about our new Word 2010 text effects.  Word 2007, for example.

So here's the scenario ...

- user creates a document in Word 2010, adds some new text effects and saves that as a new style
- Word 2010 saves the styles part with those new effects in ignorable namespaces; Word 2007 will discard the ignorable namespaces, as described in Section 10.1.1 above
- Word 2010 also saves an identical copy of the styles part, which is not used in the rendering the document; this is a custom part, with its own non-standard relationship type and content type, and it will be round-tripped by Word 2007
- if the document returns to Word 2010 later, Word 2010 can re-hydrate the custom-defined styles with new effects in it, even though those effects were removed from the styles part by Word 2007

I think it's a pretty good example of the intended use of ignorable namespaces, and also an example of how the flexibility of OPC can be used to improve the interoperability experience.  And the semantics of the WordprocessingML namespace are not changed in either the styles part or the StylesWithEffects part, so no worries on that front.

- Doug

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Brown [mailto:alexb at griffinbrown.co.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 10:27 AM
To: Horton, Gareth; MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given); e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: stylesWithEffects / musings ?

Gareth hi

The stylesWithEffects.xml non-standard (?) document I was referring to has a root element <styles> with the Namespace

http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main

which is "one of ours", I believe ...

- Alex.

-----Original Message-----
From: Horton, Gareth [mailto:Gareth_Horton at datawatch.com]
Sent: 16 February 2010 18:07
To: Alex Brown; MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given); e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: stylesWithEffects / musings ?

Hi Alex,

The extensions have their own namespaces, e.g. for Excel:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/drawingml/2010/slicer

http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/spreadsheetml/2010/main

http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/spreadsheetml/2010/ac

The full schemas for the extensions can be found in the documentation available on MSDN.

Obviously, they use existing elements and attributes as well, but I do not believe they use them in non-standard ways - perhaps Shawn can expound further.

Gareth

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Brown [mailto:alexb at griffinbrown.co.uk]
Sent: 16 February 2010 16:51
To: MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given); e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org
Subject: RE: stylesWithEffects / musings ?

Murata-san

>> So I repeat
>> my question, are such elements - used in extensions - subject to the 
>> constraints of 29500?

> No.  It is subject to the constraints of the MS Office 2010 extension 
> specifications

A wise man (Rick Jelliffe) wrote recently [1] about another document format:

"the purpose of namespaces is to *prevent* third parties redefining elements or attributes"

That's a view which I've certainly subscribed to in the past -- and therefore would assume that we (SC34/WG4) has some kind of jurisdiction over "our" Namespaces.

I think it is certainly bad citizenry/ecosystem-wrong-doing, or whatever, for parties to redefine Standard elements and attributes in non-Standard ways (not least since some tools may use Namespaces as a cue for how to process documents) - I'm surprised OOXML allows this!

- Alex.

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/201002/msg00024.html

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