Hey Dan,
Long time no see. :-)
At 09:32 AM 7/22/99 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>I see the abiword format is based on XML. nifty!
Thanks. We're quite happy with how it's been working out for us. We've
even tried to stay fairly CSS-like in the properties we use, at least
wherever the formatting models have been consistent enough. Add to that the
fact that we're using base64-encoded PNG as our native raster graphics
format, and we're pretty darn W3C-friendly.
Guess all that time Eric, Jeff, and I spent in WG meetings didn't go to
waste, huh? :-)
>A suggestion: how about a namespace identifier to
>document your tag vocabulary?
If I understand you correctly, you could be making as many as four distinct
suggestions here:
1. Document the !@#$!$#@ file format.
-------------------------------------
As you suggest, the most authoritative reference for this is the source, and
the file you found is a great starting place. In addition, Jeff has been
trying to keep the following document up-to-date:
abi/docs/AbiWord_DocumentFormat.abw
Discrepancies between the two are bugs, and should be logged as such in
Bugzilla.
2. Document it as a schema instead (or in addition).
----------------------------------------------------
If you or someone else would like to provide a first pass at this, we'd
happily:
- get it checked in
- try to keep it maintained
- post it at a URL on our website
- etc.
Again, once this exists and has a maintainer, discrepancies are bugs.
3. Explicitly reference that schema in the file format.
-------------------------------------------------------
Once #2 happens, this is a no-brainer as well.
If #2 doesn't happen and we posted the .abw document on the website as our
namespace reference, how obnoxious would it be if we referred to *that*
instead? After all, the product required to read that documentation is GPL,
widely available, and eminently portable. ;-)
4. Actually *use* namespaces in the file format.
------------------------------------------------
At the moment, this is of no value to us, and as Eric suggests, I have no
interest in breaking compatibility to require explicit qualifications of our
default namespace. Fortunately, if I read the spec correctly, this isn't
necessary, right?
However, one of the developers on this list (Matt Kimball) has been
investigating SVG for use as our native vector graphics format, so I expect
that when he's ready to add it, making the SVG namespace explicit would be a
Good Thing.
Do you know whether James has added namespace support to expat any time in
the last year? It's been the better part of a year since we last grabbed a
copy of his code.
Paul
PS: For completeness' sake, I should also mention that we currently use XML
for our XP preferences file format (instead of platform-specific INI or
registry stuff), but I highly doubt that a schema or namespace for that
would ever be worth bothering with.
