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

[Robin LaFontaine <robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com>]

I'd like to explore one of your points, Dennis, where you say:

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.

The use of change tracking in conjunction with document comparison is actually an important use case which should not be dismissed. Let me give you two examples.

[1] A company involved in financial and legal printing wanted to use ODT and OpenOffice.org as the basis for preparing large legal documents, which contained a lot of financial tables. These documents had to be submitted to regulators, who made comments and required certain revisions. There was a requirement to resubmit the updated document to the regulators, and show precisely what changes had been made.

There was no way that this could have been done with change tracking, even if the change tracking in ODT had been sufficiently powerful. One reason for this is that  they did not want the regulators to see intermediate versions, and another reason was that multiple authors were working on the document. Therefore it was necessary to do a detailed document comparison in order to provide the regulators with what they required. We were asked to write a comparator for ODT for this specific purpose, including detailed comparison of the financial tables (this is now available as a free extension to OOo and is based on ODT 1.1).

[2] This company also had a requirement for multiple authors to work on a single large (several hundred pages) document simultaneously. Therefore they needed to be able to merge the edits from multiple authors together into a single document. Again, they asked us to write software to do this based on ODT. In this case we had to use the change track facilities in order to allow the 'chief' editor to review edits by all the other editors and accept or reject them for a final version of the document. Again, this was based on document comparison because intermediate changes were not relevant and because of the complexity of merging tracked changes together.


You could argue that the first case here, document comparison, is not a change tracking use case because there is no requirement to be able to accept or reject the changes. Rather there is a requirement to be able to see where changes have been made - but this is a really important use case. This may be a useful distinction which we need to explore further, for example rather than talking about 'change tracking', we could talk about 'edit tracking' and 'revision tracking'. These might be defined as follows:

'Edit tracking' is the ability to record edits made in an editing application in order that they can be viewed, accepted or rejected at a later date.

'Revision tracking' is the ability to record changes to a document such that these changes can be displayed in a document viewer, but there is no requirement that the changes can be undone.

I think we are beginning to uncover some of the reasons behind our differences in opinion in terms of requirements.

Regards,
Robin


On 16/05/2011 17:07, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

004401cc13e3$6c4a3bd0$44deb370$@acm.org" type="cite">

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


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