Re: my comments on the numbering spec proposal discussed by David F. andFlorian R.

[Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>]

I read the mailing list archives and wanted to comment on this post from 
Oliver.
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200611/msg00108.html

Oliver wrote Thu, 30 Nov 2006 13:50:34:
> The text:style-override approach seems to more natural to me. I've got
> some numbered paragraphs in a certain list and wants to apply another
> label format to a part of these paragraphs.

There is a big assumption in this paragraph that I'd like to address.
You state that you start out with 'numbered paragraphs in a certain list'. And 
go from there.
In reality there is no way to explicitly say that a number of paragraphs 
belong to a list in the examples given (using text:numbered-paragraph). The 
assumption seems to be that all numbered paragraphs that belong to a certain 
style belong to the same list.

Now, this means that having 5 lists, and I want to structure my ODF document 
to make it clear there are 5 lists, that I would need 5 different styles.
That completely breaks the concept of separating content from markup.

I think that the suggestion that Florian made is based on visual appearance. 
Which is correct if we want ODF to be used as a fileformat for a text. But it 
breaks down if you want to use the text for more structural purposes. Like 
datamining it. Why? Because 2 separate lists using the same style can no 
longer be separated as their style is their 'list id' in the 
text:style-override proposal.

> The text:list-id approach also allows to break the structural
> information given by using text:list and text:list-item to defined a
> certain list.
I understand your point, and you what you say makes sense.
There is just one problem; the list-id was suggested by David to allow 
OpenOffice to use text:numbered-paragraph instead of the text:list tags.
Naturally the list-id is useless (and, as you point out, counter productive) 
for the text:list way of working. The hierarchical structure already provides 
the list id implicitly.

As a best of both worlds solution; what about this;

a) To allow style-override the style that florian wants it.
Note that a list-id is irrelevant since the hierarchical structure already 
supplies that.  So all the list items auto-inherit the list style, unless 
they specifically override it.

<text:list text:style-name="L1">
   <text:list-item text:style-override="L2">
     <text:p>Main Chapter</text:p>
   </text:list-item>
etc

The disconnected way that KOffice does numbering is better represented using 
the numbered-paragraph and the text:level method.
To allow continues numbering (for example for headers) you can name the list 
using text:list-id, this property would be optional. Paragraphs following 
each other are implied to be in the same list.
To allow any style of numbering, even if its different from the rest of the 
list the text:style-name  is provided in the numbered-paragraph.

<text:numbered-paragraph text:level="1"
          text:style-name="L2" text:list-id="mylist">
        <text:p text:style-name="P1">Main chapter</text:p>
</text:numbered-paragraph>

-- 
Thomas Zander
KOffice

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