Re: [office-comment] c/o office-collab: Regarding ODF Collaboration.

["J. Greenlees" <lists@jaqui-greenlees.net>]

Florian Reuter wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
> 
> sorry for the late response.
> 
> Wrt. to your questions:
> 
>> 1) Should improvements to change tracking be limited to operations on
>> the document? In other words, shouldn't change tracking encompass
>> metadata such as the change author, date, position (in a series of
>> changes) and the like?
> 
> If you mean meta-information about the change's author, grouping etc.
> of course. I'm not quite sure why you assume otherwise.
> 
>> 2) Should change tracking be moved to metadata and hence possibly to
>> outside of the document storage? Perhaps by specialized applications?
>> Thinking that storing XML-based change tracking in the document places a
>> real burden on the primary application.
> 
> Hmm ---- interesting. I think ODF MetaData are powerful enough for
> sure ;-) However change tracking is a quite substantial part of an
> office format. Maybe moving change tracking to meta-data kind of makes
> them a "second-class citizen" compared to the "first-class ODF tags"
> and forces everyone to implement ODF MetaData --- which nobody has
> done yet I think.
> 
> In my opinion the existing ODF style mechanism can be used. In other
> words: We could use the same mechanism as e.g. marking a text "hidden"
> to attach change-tracking and change-tracking-meta-data.
A thought on this: It is because of the "change tracking" being embedded
into M.S. Office files that there were unintended disclosures of
confidential information. While keeping the change tracking is a good
idea, the risk of accidentally handing out information that is required
by law to be kept confidential means that in document storage of the
changes might need to be rethought. In the case of something like Google
Docs, or similar, storing the changes on the server makes them available
to all, just need to have a more granular control over who gets access
to the "document history" if it's publicly accessible.

I just think that keeping things that privacy protection legislation
covers out of the documents change tracking if it's embedded is the
impossible task. The easiest way to avoid exposing said information
would be keeping change tracking out of the document itself.

Jaqui

~snip~