Content Regions in ODF

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

The following is not an ODF 1.2 issue but it is one that I wanted to 
note for the future.

In the discussion of Florian's fieldmark proposal, Rob observed that we 
have several mechanisms for marking a region of content in ODF.

Actually I have found seven of them that explicitly use the -start/-end 
form for the elements names:

<text:alphabetical-index-mark-start>, 
<text:alphabetical-index-mark-end>, linked by having the same value in 
the text:id attribute.

<text:bookmark-start>, <text:bookmark-end>, linked by having the same 
value in the text:name attribute.

<text:change-start>, <text:change-end>, linked by having the same value 
in the text:change-id attribute.

|<text:index-entry-link-start>, <text:index-entry-link-end>, Note the 
schema doesn't provide any attribute to bind the two elements together. 
(I checked the 1.0, 1.1, and latest draft schemas.)|

<text:reference-mark-start>, <text:reference-mark-end>, linked by having 
the same value in the text:name attribute.

<text:toc-mark-start>, <text:toc-mark-end>, linked by having the same 
value in the text:id attribute.

<text:user-index-mark-start>, <text:user-index-mark-end>, linked by 
having the same value in the text:id attribute.


They all serve different purposes but they do have in common:

1) They mark some region of content in an ODF document

2) They mark that content without regard to the XML structure of the 
document

As Rob suggested earlier, it might be a good idea to think about a 
single mechanism that marks portions of content with some means to 
distinguish the purpose for the marking.

I can easily imagine a point plus -start/-end form of a general element 
with a typing attribute that has a canonical set of values established 
by the TC and that allows for a string extension so that developers can 
extend the types. Thinking that could provide some means for 
experimentation that is prior to the TC actually extending the list of 
types with defined semantics.

As I said, not an ODF 1.2 issue but I thought the information might be 
useful in the context of the fieldmark discussion.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)