RE: [office-collab] 1. Backward compatibility: what are requirements?

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

My understanding is that ECT takes the existing change tracking as a basis:

"The basic idea behind this proposal is to preserve the existing ODF change tracking and extend it to support missing use cases.  We believe this best preserves backward compatibility with existing implementations and makes best use of existing patterns and code.  It also maintains the current model of ignoring changes for applications that do not support change tracking.  A relatively small number of additions to the existing capability can enable a core set of previously unsupported use cases."

I am assuming that part of that effort would be to rationalize the specification of the ODF 1.0/1.1/1.2 change tracking and elaborate further for additional cases.  I'm not sure how it could be properly extended otherwise.

So my inclination is to take the ECT direction with details based on what it takes to make it all come out sound.

 - Dennis

PS: I have been surveying implementations of change-tracking in a variety of products.  It is sobering to note that none of them are very consistent and seem to have a lot of seemingly-random aberrations, with the degree of interoperability (via format converters or common native format) of change tracking a veritable shambles.  The most reliable case I have found is how Google Docs avoids doing change tracking altogether but provides a kind of Wiki-style rejection control -- you can always revert to an earlier stage but you can't deal with changes individually.  Some products base their change-tracking on document comparison, which doesn't really apply to our case and has uneven results, especially if it is inconsistent with what change-tracking does.   I am sure there are projects that may do change-tracking superbly but apparently not in the office-productivity document space.  It is daunting to consider that the ODF 1.0/1.1/1.2 approach, as sketchy as it is, has the seeds of one of the best change-tracking mechanisms ever.  (I will keep searching.)



-----Original Message-----
From: robert_weir@us.ibm.com [mailto:robert_weir@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 06:23
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org
Cc: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [office-collab] 1. Backward compatibility: what are requirements?

Dennis, do you have an opinion to offer on the two change tracking proposals currently under consideration? 

You seem to be beating up on a third option -- doing nothing -- that is 
not something that is under consideration at this point.   Or at least I 
have not heard anyone seriously offer that as a proposal.

-Rob