ODF 1.2 comment: metadata

[rjelliffe@allette.com.au]

This is a comment on ODF1.2 draft Part 1, section 4.1 Metadata - General.

S4.1 says
"OpenDocument supports five types of metadata:
1)RDF metadata describing documents or the content of identifiable ODF
elements
2)Text content being used as RDF metadata
3)Pre-defined metadata (meta.xml)
4)User-defined metadata (using the <meta:user-defined> element)
5)Custom metadata (custom XML elements within meta.xml)"

This summary does not tie in with the following subsections in any way.
Taking them in order:

1) Is this supposed to be about s4.2.2 manifest.rdf?  "Identifiable ODF
element" should be a defined term at least.  SUGGESTION: clarify

2) Is this supposed to be about s4.2.1?  But there is no necessity for
text content to be involved in RDFa is there? (E.g. if @xhtml:content is
used.) So is this supposed to be about s7.5.19 <text:meta-field> ?  But
that makes no mention of RDF. SUGGESTION: Clarify

3) No issues.

4) The element <meta:user-defined> is inadequately defined.

The @name attribute's purpose is not defined, but can be guessed. However,
it has no type. In the schema it is a string type. A name is, in almost
all computing and markup languages, a token. However, it seems that in
this case, the name could be any string? SUGGESTION: Text should be added
to clarify this.

There is no provision to provide a scheme (notation) for the attribute.
This makes it more difficult to use generic grddl scripts, perhaps, but it
is poor markup.  The HTML meta element has an attribute scheme for this
purpose (e.g. scheme=ISBN). This is useful in its own right, but also
necessary to round-trip metadata with HTML.  SUGGESTION: The scheme
attribute following the HTML definition should be made available on
meta:user-defined.

Furthermore, there is nothing preventing meta:user-defined from containing
binary blobs in some proprietary format. SUGGESTION: Text should be added
to the conformance section or that non-textual data in meta:user-defined
is unacceptable in any ODF document.

5) No issues.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe