Re: [office] Fwd: [odf-devel] ODF & ITS

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net> wrote
on 03/20/2006 10:55:44 AM:

> Bruce,
> 
> Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Mar 20, 2006, at 3:57 AM, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> >
> >> Should we talk to them? Is this relevant to the metadata
SC?
> >
> >
> > My personal opinion is this is outside the scope of ODF. It seems
to 
> > me their use cases are a) schemas, and b) non-GUI document markup,
> > particularly DocBook; e.g. not GUI-based formats.
> >
> While I tend to agree that their goal is outside the scope of ODF,
is 
> there a use case for putting in a hook where this sort of "metadata"
> could be included?
> 


At first glance, it appears that no changes are required
to use ITS with ODF.  Section 1.5 of ODF 1.0 specifically allows the
addition of attributes in foreign namespaces.  So, any editor is free
to generate ITS tags automatically, based on styles, via a UI, etc.

However, doing so does not really facilitate the interchange
of ODF with ITS between editors, since it does not standardize which elements
allow ITS tags.  We also have the issue of how ITS tags apply to our
contained markup's like SVG, XForms, MathML, etc.  Someone needs to
define how ITS applies to them.

Keep in mind that ODF is in the middle of the spectrum.
 We're not DITA or DocBook.  And we're not PDF.  We have
presentational aspects as well as structural and (with the metadata SC)
an emerging requirement for semantic tagging.

Since ITS is still a W3C working draft, there is certain
room for collaboration here.  IMHO, if a W3C TC is thinking about
the impact of their draft standard on ODF, then this is a good thing and
should be encouraged, perhaps by assigning a liaison to work with them.
 This isn't among what I consider our immediate concerns, but is certainly
something worth tracking for the longer term.

-Rob