XML serialization functionality

[Frans Englich]

Thought some more on this.

On Monday 20 March 2006 12:50, David Faure wrote:
> On Monday 20 March 2006 10:39, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > David Faure wrote:
> > >Yep, but it's not enough for OASIS-compliant saving.
> > >It can use indentation everywhere -except- inside <text:p> tags, where
> > > space matters. So some reimplementable behavior is needed (but I agree
> > > that a string might be overkill, from a API point of view an int is
> > > enough, as long as it can be turned off completely for a given tag).
> > >Not that I'm really motivated to port KOffice's saving code yet another
> > > time, so this is a rather academic discussion to me.
> >
> > We're talking about tag indenting, I hope.
> >
> > Text should never be indented. It should be preserved as-is, including
> > line-breaks and spacing characters.
>
> There are other tags under text:p...
>    <text:p>A <text:span>B</text:span> C</text:p>

Why is indentation needed?

With my limited knowledge, the only one I see who would gain from having the 
document indented is those who decides to extract and open the XML 
documents(and hack it). Indentation seems to me like a feature that has, 
relatively speaking, a very small user base, at the cost of CPU and storage 
usage of all users. With reservations, it sounds like it is a feature that 
should be skipped, and thus make KOffice even more lighter and user-oriented.

If I were a UI designer for OO.o I would skip such identation options because 
it would be a trade off where it was improved for the vast majority of the 
users: the UI became simpler and contained more relevant content(relying on 
Waldo's comment here).

Those who want to hack the format can easily run the file through an XML 
indenter or open it in an XML editor, imho.

Or what is the correct story of this?


Cheers,

		Frans