okay well:
"Thank GODDESS for the OO XML project, Microsoft's partially reformed
Office XML format team, and all others who are saving us from the abject
horror of having to contemplate XHTML as an office file format.
"

And why are you giving thanks for these projects, because it saves us
from the horrors of writing:

<div class="monty">
 <span class="python"/>
</div class"monty">


are you kidding me?

If there is one thing those projects aren't involved in it's the
creation of aesthetically pleasing, non-verbose markup formats.
Microsoft's Office xml makes a tidied version of their html
preferable. And while OO is complete and certainly more logical than
Microsoft's it's not anywhere as simple to deal with as XHTML.
Especially when one considers the number of namespaces involved.

what would your example above look like in OO, something like:


<text:p text:style-name="Monty">
<text:span text:style-name="Python"/>
</text:p>

I'm not seeing the clear benefit.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

On 12/2/05, Uche Ogbuji <Uche.Ogbuji@f...> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 11:00 -0800, Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen
> at Cisco) wrote:
> > If we're talking about a document format to replace MS word documents,
> > we need much more than XHTML.  XHTML holds the content of the document
> > and provides (some) semantic information about that content.  To
> > replicate what a word doc can do and does do for most users, you have to
> > also specify how it's going to display and probably provide some
> > information to the application about how the editing experience should
> > be presented.
>
> I don't know why I'm even bothering with such a hopelessly subjective
> debate, but since everyone here seems to be so eager to crown XHTML for
> office formats, I'll pip up and say say:
>
> Thank GODDESS for the OO XML project, Microsoft's partially reformed
> Office XML format team, and all others who are saving us from the abject
> horror of having to contemplate XHTML as an office file format.
>
> Are you kidding me?
>
> All arguments for XHTML everywhere eventually boil down to arguments
> that rather than
>
> <monty>
>   <python/>
> </monty>
>
> I should write:
>
> <div class="monty">
>   <span class="python"/>
> </div class"monty">
>
> No bloody thank you.  Freedom from naming-by-committee is what drew me
> to XML in the first place.  I am not about to chuck that freedom for the
> very false comfort of a protean generic identifier.
>
> And when I hear people preaching that people should stop writing new XML
> vocabularies, I just wonder who's been passing out the XHTML
> +Atom-is-all-you-need Kool-Aid.
>
> I'll use XHTML for Web content, ODF for documents of more typical
> front-office style, Atom for Web feeds and information that is extremely
> easy to mistake for a Web feed, XBEL for links and Web resource
> directories (not XOXO-cum-XHTML, not OPML, not even Atom), and so on.
>
> I have great tools and technologies such as RNG, XSLT, Schematron and
> more to manage diverse formats, and I see no reason to wallow in a
> narrow markup dungeon.
>
>
> --
> Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
> http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
> http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
> Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/
>
>
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