From koffice  Thu Apr 26 18:01:13 2001
From: Thomas Zander <zander () planescape ! com>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 18:01:13 +0000
To: koffice
Subject: Re: Hopeful suggestion for kword
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice&m=98830874419385

On Wednesday 25 April 2001 17:30, Nicolas Goutte wrote:
> Yes, but it makes it incompatible with most XML tools, which suppose that
> formating is either automatic ( <?xml-stylesheet ),  in the tags (like the
> "id", "class" and "style" attributes of XHTML with CSS)  or inline (like
> for example <b> element in XHTML.)

But that means that the formatting has to be done with extra-tags. Tags like 
<p> or similar.
That would defeat the whole purpose of using xml.
Again, XML is about seperating content from markup.

Take a page like slashdot (the html), and try to read it.
A xml document like kword is a lot more readable then that because you have a 
paragraph of text contained in 1 text tag.

If we still want to use XML (and we do) AND do what you suggest, to insert 
<p>, <b> etc into the text we would take twice the time for loading since we 
then mix 2 concepts, the XML concept and the markup-language concept. And 
this is very bad design.

To illustrate this in other words;
kword works in structures. We have frames in framesets and paragraphs etc.
This nesting, and structuring is ideally illustrated in an XML document.

Besides the perl script to do what you want to do is very easy to create in 
either case. Its not like its some obscure algorithm hidden in closed source 
software. Its just counting characters...

And if we would change, in 2 months someone would come along and wants to 
search the xml documents, and complains that he can't find "some text" since 
we have "some <b>text" in the XML...

-- 
Thomas