Re: [office] feature request for enhanced OOo input fields: somesuggestions for discussion

[Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@gmail.com>]

Oliver-Rainer Wittmann - Software Engineer - Sun Microsystems wrote:

> there are no more comments or questions coming in on this topic. Also, 
> nobody else provided new Pros or Cons for the different variants.
> Thus, I want to propose to restrict our further discussion on variants 
> (4a)/(4b) and (2) as the next step on this topic. Any objections?

No objection.

> I also want to ask the TC members to state their opinions on variants 
> (4a)/(4b) and (2) in order to come to a conclusion, for which variant, 
> we should work out a concrete proposal.
> 
> My personal opinion is that we should choose variant (4a)/(4b) or 
> variant (2) to fulfill the made feature request - each of these variants 
> would be Ok for OpenOffice.org.

I guess I lean towards 4a or b, since it's well-formed.

I do have a couple of questions though:

Michael presented this example:

<text:NEW-ELEMENT>
    <text:p>
    *<text:NEW-ELEMENT-PREFIX>*
      *Special interests:*
    *</text:NEW-ELEMENT-PREFIX>*
      <text:span text:style-name="BoldTextStyle>hobbies:</text:span>
    </text:p>
    <text:list>
      <text:list-item>
        <text:p>german soccer league</text:p>
      </text:list-item>
      ...
    </text:list>
    <text:p><bold>programming languages:</bold></paragraph>
      <text:span text:style-name="BoldTextStyle>prog.lang:</text:span>
    </text:p>
    <table:table>
    ...
    </table:table>
    <text:p><bold>programming languages:</bold></paragraph>
      <text:span text:style-name="BoldTextStyle>others:</text:span>
    </text:p>
    ...
    <text:list>
      ...
      <text:list-item>
        <text:p>OpenDocument</text:p>
      </text:list-item>
    </text:list>
</text:NEW-ELEMENT>

I'm a little confused by the 
text:NEW-ELEMENT/text:p/text:NEW-ELEMENT-PREFIX path. Why is the 
paragraph a child of the field, and the prefix a child of that paragraph?

And am I right to understand the text:NEW-ELEMENT would appear within a 
text:p element? Or would it stand alone; e.g.:

<text:p>...</text:p>
<text:NEW-ELEMENT>...</text:NEW-ELEMENT>

...?

I'm partly asking about the prefix and suffix elements because we were 
suggesting something analogous as RDF properties for the 
text:meta-field, and want to make sure we have some common understanding.

And for Michael:

> (4b) is like (4a), except that there is a single 
> <text:NEW-ELEMENT-LABEL> instead of <text:NEW-ELEMENT-PREFIX> and 
> <text:NEW-ELEMENT-SUFFIX>. This element may appear anywhere within the 
> content. What we win by this is that a input field may have multiple 
> areas, where text input is possible, mixed with areas that have 
> non-editable content. We furthermore would not have to describe where 
> the elements may appear, because they can appear anywhere. However, I'm 
> not sure if we need this flexibility. If so, I may provide an example 
> this may look like.

Yes, while it has a certain elegance at the markup level, I was 
wondering the use case for this. Please provide an example.

Bruce