spreadsheet table:cell/table:table was: Re: [office] OpenDocument TCcoordination call minutes 2007-08-13

[Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@Sun.COM>]

Hi Kohei,

I agree with Andreas here, disallowing it and then putting it back in 
once we see that we need; thus changing the schema back and forth 
doesn't really help that much.

I understand that the problem comes somewhat from the perspective of how 
formulas would be able to access the nested table. Michael already send 
a message to David et al. from the formula SC to ask their opinion on this.

In principle however I don't think that this is such a big issue. A cell 
that holds a table may not be so much different from a cell that holds 
an image: its value-attribute is empty, and that is what would be passed 
to a formula that references it. My understanding would thus be that a 
nested table is currently opaque from the point of view of formulas in 
the surrounding table.

Andreas has suggested some interesting applications for recursive tables 
in spreadsheet while we were discussing subtables. For instance I recall 
the idea to use them to represent matrix types. The potential to have 
this kind of progress would be another reason to keep the schema as it 
is. A clarification that nested tables cannot be accessed from formulas 
may be good, if the assumptions that I made above hold. Lets see what 
the formula experst have to say to this...

Cheers,
Lars

Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 15:14 -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
>> On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 12:29 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
>>> Just because current spreadsheets do not use these possibilities, we
>>> really should not prohibit them. There are people putting pictures
>>> graphs and many other widgets on a spreadsheet. The ability to include
>>> tables inside table cells seem to be a quite natural extension of a
>>> spreadsheet.
>> Sure, but currently no spreadsheet implements that, and certainly if one
>> spreadsheet application implements such a feature, we can consider
>> adding it to the ODF when that happens.
>>
>> Maybe my use of "disallow" was inappropriate.  How about exclude it from
>> the RNG schema definition?
> 
> Or, maybe just state in the spec that its behavior is undefined ?
> 
> At least such statement will make our intent more specific.
> 
> Kohei
> 
>