RE: [office-collab] Using RDF for Change Tracking serialization?

[monkeyiq <monkeyiq@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 12:26 -0700, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> ...
> I agree that xml:id attributes and there values should be preserved
> when the element having them is preserved in the document structure.
> (If the element is swept up in a deletion, it seems to me that so is
> the xml:id, and it is not available for reuse until the deletion is
> accepted and no longer tracked.)  [This creates a problem that has to
> be resolved if moves are treated as a combination of a deletion and an
> insertion.]

I don't see that the value of an xml:id need be special. If an
application wants to change it that's fine IMHO. But it needs to do
something like changeid( oldid, newid ) where references in RDF to oldid
are changed to newid so that links from RDF to content.xml are
preserved. Of course this breaks RDF outside the ODF file, but that RDF
could link to a triple inside the ODF file instead of the xml:id if it
wanted stability.

KOffice changes xml:id values because it was seen that the system should
be able to reassign xml:id values of it's choosing to avoid having to
select new ones which do not clash with existing ones.

> 
> I'm not sure that *any* implementation of ODF as a native format
> preserves xml:id, and we should check for that.  I would definitely be
> surprised that xml:id is preserved by import into a non-ODF document
> processor where the manipulated document is then exported back to ODF
> format.  (I don't expect that RDF/XML and embedded RDFa will survive
> such a journey either.)

This is exactly what happens in recent builds of abiword. For example,
during a copy and paste operation non ODF content is available on the
clipboard. In the paste the encoded xml:id values are sought from the
clipboard content, updated, and the RDF (if any) associated with the
source copy/cut is relinked to the pasted content.

Links and RDF are also preserved across non ODF save/load cycles. For
example loading an ODT with RDF and saving it to abw format, closing
abiword, opening abiword and loading the abw and saving back to ODT does
what one would hope. That being RDF preservation and any RDF pointing to
xml:id links being preserved.

I don't find this so surprising, it is more a matter of wanting it to
happen.