Office 2003 XML

Auxiliary Hints in WordprocessingML

Until now, we’ve managed to stick to a pretty strict diet of elements and attributes from the WordprocessingML namespace, which has had times more pleasant than others. Now it’s time to introduce a set of elements and attributes from another namespace that are designed purely for the purpose of making your life easier. That’s right, you guessed it: the wx prefix is your friend (so long as it’s mapped to the right namespace: http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/auxHint).

There are quite a few contexts in which elements and attributes from the wx namespace appear in WordprocessingML documents saved by Word. We’ll be focusing on some of the most significant of these: sections, sub-sections, and list text, as well as formatting hints. These hints save consumers of WordprocessingML documents much grief and processing power that would otherwise be spent on things like traversing the links of a list definition, for example.

Again, elements and attributes in the wx namespace represent information that could be useful to us in handling WordprocessingML but that is of no internal use to Word. One implication of this distinction is that, while you may write applications that depend on their presence, it hardly ever makes sense to write applications that output elements or attributes in the wx namespace when generating WordprocessingML—except perhaps when doing incremental processing of an existing document such that you want to maintain the auxiliary ...