Re: [office] ODF Modularization Toward Document 2,0

[Svante Schubert <svante.schubert@gmail.com>]

Hi Rob,

The report was very interesting in terms of schema design.
I really do like their analysis of namespace dependencies, schema pattern and I share their observation on ODF schema naming inconsistencies.
If there might be a refactoring of the ODF schema in the future, this report covers some preliminary work.

On the other hand, in regard of modularization I fear the work is barely started.
They based their concept solely on ODF syntax, just analyzing the dependencies of XML namespaces (prefixes) within the RelaxNG schema.
Thy neither questioning the correctness of the given ODF prefixes (input), nor proofing their own statements (output) by user scenarios or user documents.  
For example Figure 4 is showing their visioned module structure, but there is no dependency from the text module to the table, although a text document should be able to use tables.
Their approach is like a semantic black box testing, solely focusing on syntax. Not even ODF MIME types were considered in their modularization attempt.

Considering the large amount of ODF XML it seems obvious that modularization effort should start with the creation of a tool to analyze the ODF schema, for instance based on schema2template of the Apache ODF Toolkit..
Questions like:

• What is the minimal ODF document of a certain MIME type (minimal XML tree / empty document)?
• What (root) components can be added to such an empty document?
• What can be changed on components?
  
• What changes do I have to support?
  

are best solved with the aid of automation.

Svante

Am 11.11.2011 00:55, schrieb robert_weir@us.ibm.com:

We had talked about modularizing the ODF schema previously.  My colleagues 
at the IBM Tokyo Research Center did an investigation of the possibilities 
a while ago.  I just recently received permission to share their report. 
Although it was looking at the ODF 1.0 schema, I think there are some good 
insights here.

Regards,

-Rob