Re: [office-collab] Two items for voting..

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

In general I agree that it is a good idea to have edit-operation as required. The idea would be to define the allowed values, for example:
  odt:text-replace
  odt:formatted-text-replace
etc
Each of these needs a precise definition so that a reader knows what to expect. It would be a very useful piece of work to start to define these... if you are looking for work that could be progressed!

If all the basics are in place, e.g. add/delete for text, paragraph, list, table... then any change can be represented, albeit at a coarse level.

There will be situations where one editing application (or indeed batch process) is able to do a type of edit that falls outside these definitions. Then this can either be disallowed or can be allowed as an extension. Consider perhaps the effect of running a macro and the edits that makes to the document - could these be handled this way? If extensions are used, e.g. msword:text-to-table (maybe there are better examples..), then these can be gradually added to the standard as and when there is agreement that they are useful as 'standard' operations.

There is an issue here for comparison because in comparing there is no information on what the user did. However it is not impossible to synthesise this in a reasonable way, given that the worst case can always be used, e.g. delete/add-paragraph or delete/add-table.

In terms of your point 2, it might be a good start to develop a more formal definition of each of the operations listed in ECT in order to validate that these are indeed the full set that will be a good first milestone. Such an effort would seem to be valuable whatever approach is chosen. The definitions of these operations is in some cases just a few words and would benefit from some development.

Robin

On 26/09/2011 16:26, Svante Schubert wrote:

Dear SC,

I am currently unaware of the items the SC is working on (aside the chair's work on the consensus report). Could someone give me an update, are we idling?
In any case, there are two votes I would like to trigger ASAP here on SC level:

1. To make the specification the yet optional attribute "edit-operation" of GCT mandatory. In order to ease overall  usage and interoperability  (see details [1])
2. Agree on the functionality (set of operations) that should be supported by the SC's first milestone to deliver. I would suggest to take the feature set from the ECT as basis for negotiation (see [2], [3]).
   

Regards,
Svante

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-collab/201109/msg00038.html
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/41699/extended-ct-proposal.odt
[3] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/41816/extended-ct-proposal%20Supplement%201.odt