Re: [office] text:meta-field

["Florian Reuter" <freuter@novell.com>]

Hi Rob,

to further investigate your idea: Could you please illustrate it according to the sample I posted in:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200710/msg00107.html

Thanks,

~Florian

>>> <robert_weir@us.ibm.com> 10/30/07 3:04 PM >>>
"Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote on 10/30/2007 06:46:34 AM:

> 
> What technical justification is there for breaking the xml tree model 
please?
> 

Could someone please post the specific section and paragraph number in the 
ODF specification which we are proposing to change?   Remember "field" is 
an ambiguous term in ODF, which could refer to either form fields (Chapter 
11 "Form Content") as well as text fields (Chapter 6 "Text Fields").  I 
think it will help if we're all on the same page.

Also, I'd like to see a use case posted.  I've seen Florian's example, but 
that doesn't really motivate what is being asked for.  Is the intent, for 
example, to be able to have fields that contain arbitrary rich text?  If 
we can nail down what the use case is, then we can discuss the best way of 
achieving it.

I observe that today in OO Writer, a user can select portions of text from 
two adjacent paragraphs and mark the selection as bold.  This is stored 
using text:span for the bolded selection in each paragraph.  Have we 
explored whether such an approach is applicable with fields?

But I must say that I see great benefits to being able to say that a 
field, of either variety, contains data of a single type. By "type", I 
mean a singly rooted XML element like <p>, a real subdocument, not a 
"document fragment".  For XForms use, I believe this is mandatory. 

Introducing markup tags that cut across the logical structure of the 
document in arbitrary ways would bring a large increase in complexity to 
the processing of ODF.  So, let's make sure we absolutely need this before 
we add it. 


-Rob