Follow-up: Online demonstration of proposal to improve change tracking in ODF

[Michiel Leenaars <michiel.ml@nlnet.nl>]

L.S.,

to assist the Oasis ODF Technical Committee with their review of the ODF 
Change Tracking proposal for ODF 1.2 as submitted via this list in August 
2010, an online OpenDocument Format Change Tracking Prototype was created by 
DeltaXML for OpenDoc Society through a grant from NLnet foundation. 

                     http://www.deltaxml.com/samples/track-changes/

This is a partial implementation of the proposed change tracking format for 
ODF [1]. DeltaXML provides a live sandbox for an interactive demo as well as a 
web service where you can upload your own XML files. Both work on the 
serialized version of ODF files (of any version) and on any other XML files or 
fragments. They do not yet work on the more common ODF documents packaged in a 
ZIP container. 

If you have any further requests, please let us know.

Kind regards,

on behalf of OpenDoc Society
Michiel Leenaars

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/201007/msg00009.html

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The prototype demonstrates the following types of changes on your documents:

    * 6.1 Add an element and its content (insert-with-content)
    * 6.2 Delete an element and its content (remove-with-content)
    * 6.3 Add an element around some existing content (insert-around-content)
    * 6.4 Delete an element but not its content (remove-leaving-content)
    * 6.7 Add an attribute to an element
    * 6.8 Delete an attribute from an element
    * 6.9 Change the value  of an attribute
    * 6.11 Add text (PCDATA)
    * 6.12 Delete mixed or PCDATA content

This prototype does NOT cover (please see below for some explanation about 
this):

    * 6.5 Split an element into two elements (split)
    * 6.6 Merge two sibling elements into one (merge)
    * 6.10 Move an element (move )
    * 6.13 Change the type of an element
    * 6.14 Changes to External Objects
    * 6.15 Handling ID attributes

Implementation of 6.3 and 6.4 is based on certain element names which are 
currently: xhtml:em, xhtml:strong, text:span, em, strong and span.  This 
demonstration does not always generate optimal results for these cases.

For this demonstration, the result is wrapped in delta:tracked-change-demo and 
the change transactions are at the end in delta:tracked-changes.

*** Notes on Limitations for this Demonstration

This demonstration compares two documents and generates a tracked-change 
representation. This is not the same as tracking changes in an editor, so the 
results may not reflect exactly what an editor has actually done. Therefore 
the demonstration is not able to show moves (6.10), but these will appear as a 
deletion and an insertion. Similarly, split (6.5) and merge (6.6) of 
paragraphs (for example) cannot be shown in that way, but will appear as added 
or deleted text in multiple paragraphs. Changes to external objects (6.14) and 
Handling ID attributes (6.15) are outside the scope of this first 
demonstration.

To understand how these types of changes are represented please check the test 
documents that were submitted alongside the proposed specification, see the 
paper "Representing Changes in Open Document Format" available here:

http://www.deltaxml.com/library/articles-and-papers.html

Note also that although the specification allows for new tracked changes to be 
added to a document that already has tracked changes, this demonstration does 
not do that for now, due to time constraints in getting the demonstration 
available quickly.