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Subject: Re: [office] comparing requirements against Thomas'/David's/Oliver'sproposal


On Tuesday 27 March 2007 12:51, Florian Reuter wrote:
> if the TC votes NO and writes this clearly in the spec nobody will be able
> to ask that again.
>
> However atm. the sentence
> <quote>
> Numbered paragraphs may use the same continuous numbering properties that
> list items use, and thus form an equivalent, alternative way of specifying
> lists. A list in <text:list> representation could be converted into a list
> in <text:numbered-paragraph> representation and vice versa.
> </quote>
> from paragraph 4.3.4 is not clear whether this means:
> a) The lists share the same concept but have different representations.
> b) The lists have different concepts but are somehow convertable into each
> other.
>
> So this needs this to be clarified.

Ok, fair enough. The long history of the two concepts must have made this 
paragraph too confusing for those that have not studies that history.

I said that your answer would be found in the mail archives.  Which is still a 
good idea.
Below I pasted two relevant passages. To make it easier to digest.
As you can see after reading it; the usage of the two listing concepts are 
very different and not equivalent.
OOo has failed to use the numbered-paragraph in the way that the TC stated it 
should be used, and as a reaction we have seen over the years was to add more 
features to the text:list structure where numbered-paragraph was meant to be 
used.

And we are now at a point where new people come along and fail to see the 
reason for the difference between the two and for their personal reasons 
choose one and try to add features so it can represent both.

But we should not loose sight of the initial reasoning and the TC decisions 
made 4 years ago. The two concepts are inherently different and it was never 
the intention to convert from one to the other and back without loss of data.

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 18:58, Michael Brauer wrote:
> in the last TC meeting we figured out, that many text documents contain
> numbered paragraph that do not follow one after another in the document,
> but are distributed among the document. In the OpenOffice.org file
> format, such numbered paragraphs have to be represented as several list,
> each requiring its own list and list-item elements. Since such numbered
> paragarphs are not really list, this seems to be some overhead. In such
> cases, it seems to be more apropriate to individually assign the level
> and list styles to paragraphs.
>
> On the other hand, we also figured out that many documents contain
> numbered paragarphs one after another, and that such paragraphs can be
> considered to be real list. This applies to text documents, but also to
> presentations, that might also contain numbered paragraphs. We also
> figured out, that at least some office suite in its UI represent
> numbered paragarphs as list, and that many other XML schemas also
> support the concept of lists, among them are XHTML and XSL-FO, that both
> influenced the OpenOffice.org file format. For this reason, and since
> the TC charter mentions retaining high-level information, transformation
> friendliness and 'borrowing' from existing standards as requirements, it
> seems to be apropriate to also keep the concept of lists.
>
> To be able to represent both kinds of numbered paragarphs, single one
> and paragarphs that form a list, I would like to propose to
>
> - keep the concept of lists as it is, with the exception that the
> "text:ordered-list" and "text:unordered-list" elements are replaced by a
> single "text:list" element.
>
> - add a new "text:numbered-paragraph" (or "text:num-p", etc.) element.
> This element has an "text:level" element like headings ("text:h") that
> specifies which level of a list styles should be the applied to the
> paragraph. The list style itself is specified as "style:list-style-name"
>   attribute attached to the paragraph's style element, as this is the
> case already. The "text:numbered-paragraph" element must not occur
> within lists, so that there are no conflicts between the level of a
> numbered paragraph and the level a paragraph gets because it is
> contained within a list.
>
> - the "text:list" element should be used if numbered paragraphs that use
> the same list style follow one after another. "text:numbered-paragraph"
> should be used for single numbered paragraphs.

On Thursday 13 March 2003 21:10, Daniel Vogelheim wrote:
>  The problem, as I see it, is that the word-processing
> world has one kind of concept, and HTML, XSL, and basically any other
> XML format, have a different kind of concept. We want to do good XML, we
> need to represent word-processing documents, and hence we have a
> problem: How do we join these two? Both issues are listed in the charter
> as requirements, the former as  4) and 6), the latter as 1).
>
> The OOo team has given an answer, one which has been accepted as the
> base specification: Use HTML-style lists, plus an extra
> 'continue-numbering' attribute. For all I can tell, this covers both
> requirements (being reasonable XML-wise, and being able to represent all
> documents), and hence it is a good answer. However, nothing is perfect,
> and this does place a burden on implementers for file format converters.
>
> Instead, one could choose a representation that is close(r) to the
> word-processing side of things. This would make it easier for those
> people, but would make it harder for the structured markup people. And
> this is, in my view, the core of the discussion: There is inherent
> complexity in trying to bridge two worlds, and the committee gets to
> decide where to push that complexity, and how to slice it up.
>
> The one suggestion is to do structured lists + continue-numbering.
> + structure where there is structure
> - pseudo-structure in some other places where list numbering is used
>    without proper list.
> + easy for XML conversion
> - the structure may be hard to generate during conversions, and the
>    pseudo-structure is ugly
> Essentially, the conversions is where we push the complexity to.
>
> The next suggestion (Michael) uses that as base, but adds an 'escape'
> [i.e. declaring an individual paragraph to be listed at some level] to
> take away some of the burden from the filter people:
> + (optional) structure where there is structure
> - easy generation using the escape
> - redundant representation: there may be badly-behaved documents that
>    don't generate any lists even where suitable
> - corollary from above: For complete processing one really needs to
>    fully support both.
> Here, we distribute the complexity more equally, and various parties get
> to choose how much effort they want to put into it. Problem may be that
> the process may just not work very well if everyone chooses the easy way
> out.

-- 
Thomas Zander

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