Re: [office-comment] OpenDocument-v1.2-draft6.odt / Par. 1.5 page39 preservation arbitrary element content from should to shall (lines 114-130)

[Openoffice Development <openoffice@hartong.eu>]

Zwijndrecht (The Netherlands) , 07/11/07

Dear Patrick,

Thank you for your kind reply of 06-11-2007 , in the light of the mail 
of Mr. Søren Roug I think I have to clarify my mail a little bit 
further. In my proposal I'm only speaking about elements within the 
<office:meta> element as described in lines 114 till 130 in the document 
OpenDocument-v1.2-draft6.odt. The data contained in this element is most 
of times located in the file “meta.xml”. (Table 4 - Root elements , page 
43).

File size of meta.xml discussion:

This will be in most cases a small file. There are only 17 elements 
which are defined , one element is already open for user data and the 
specification leaves space for custom elements. One could argue that an 
application which must preserve all the data will need considerable 
resources because the file can grow theoretically very large. This is 
not very probable, for example the Dublin Core standard (ISO 15836:2003) 
has a count of 15 elements of which 6 are already included into this 
specification. Another example is the ECMA standard 376 (Please don't 
shoot it's an example ;-)) where 43 document meta data elements are 
defined ( Part 3, Paragraph 7.2, page 438). It is not very likely that 
an user application will add hundreds of elements extra because this 
will consume resources and even worse time for the application in 
question as well.

Test done:
As an experiment I have taken the AODL project from the OpenOffice.org 
community. The metadata is read from the “meta.xml” file into a 
datastructure (DocumentMetadata) . The program can simple take out the 
elements it's needs and with almost no extra effort all the data can be 
saved into a file 
(/adocumentreference./DocumentMetadata.Meta.Save("/filename/")) and all 
the elements are preserved including own added elements.

I fully agree with you that it would not be desirable to preserve custom 
elements within mark-up and/or content of a document this would lead to 
unwanted situations and require considerable resources of an 
OpenDocument application.

Conclusion:
Changing the word *should *to *must *for conserving custom elements 
within the <office:meta> element will not lead to “havier” applications. 
Quick scan research even shows that even “lite” application can 
implement this with little extra effort. This was a quick scan, more 
research should be done to fully prove this.

If there are any questions, remarks please don't hesitate to contact me.

Yours truly,

Timo hartong
Zwijndrecht
The Netherlands

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