Word 2003 XML

[Chris Ridd]

My very limited understanding of XML extensibility is that it is made
clear to the parser/application which elements are foreign by declaring
namespaces in the root element.

I would see it slightly differently.
[...]

It may also be worth pointing out that in the general case, a parser
may not have much info. about the schemas associated with an XML
document. The schemas, or rather the associated namespasces, may be
named in the document (e.g. using attributes that define alias names),
but the names are just names, primarily intended to ensure uniqueness
in the event of name clashes (which is what namespaces are all about).
Even where the names look like URLs they do not necessarily point to
any additional information about the schema. For example, one of the
first snippets in a WordProcessingML document defines an alias "w" as
follows:

I did oversimplify somewhat, and your description does make sense. In
the general case an application will have no knowledge of the semantics
of anything from other namespaces, so is severely limited as to what it
can do with them.

Thanks for the clarification!

Cheers,

Chris

 

[Chris Ridd]

Sure, and "Recall this Message" has never *officially* been supported by the
Mail RFCs (regardless of how much I occasionally wish it were...)

Having a hand on your MTA's ethernet cable is amazingly useful...

But you can say the same thing about ANY software company. None of them are
perfect (I don't think *any* of them are even "good"). Because Microsoft
produces more software than many companies, it produces more mistakes than
many companies.

But if you really want an exercise in frustration, try getting IBM or Apple
or Sun to observe their own standards

I think there's a difference between a bug which causes a standards
violation that a vendor then fixes, and a vendor deliberately breaking
a standard and never fixing.

Sadly Microsoft is generally in the latter camp with a few honourable
exceptions - eg Entourage (hey, nearly back on topic) is pretty good.
But generally Microsoft and standards do not go together.

Cheers,

Chris