[odf-discuss] A bit more detailed explanation of the AFNORposition

[Daniel Carrera]

marbux wrote:
> If you want to play peacemaker, that's your right. But preaching at me 
> is not going to work. You might have better luck with those who started 
> this particular fight by accusing me of telling falsehoods, once again 
> without ever identifying the supposed falsehood.

But if people who know ODF better say that you are wrong, what is the 
problem with that? Or is that "accusing you of falsehoods"? Your request 
to make ODF applications preserve foreign data not specified in the ODF 
spec is not feasible. Example:

<text:p myapp:zzz="aaa">
    Foo <text:span myapp:zzz="bbb"> Bar </text:span>
</text:p>
<text:p myapp:zzz="444"> Biz </text:p>

This text has non-ODF attributes in a separate name-space ('myapp') as 
permitted by the ODF spec.

Task: Move "Bar" to the second paragraph.

A third-party ODF app cannot know how to preserve these foreign tags. Do 
you copy the zzz="bbb"? Does that make sense outside a zzz="aaa"? Or 
inside a zzz="444"? For that matter, does a zzz="aaa" make sense without 
a zzz="bbb" inside? Maybe the zzz="aaa" has to be changed to something 
else when you remove the zzz="bbb" - but to what?

That's the problem with tags and attributes made by a different company. 
You can't know what they mean. You can't know what to do to "not destroy 
them". Hence, requiring that all ODF applications preserve foreign tags 
that are not specified publicly is asking the impossible.

Marbux has already seen examples like this one. I present it for the 
benefit of other readers. I will stop replying to this thread, as I feel 
that it is not productive.

Daniel.