Re: [office-collab] Generic CT proposal - an implementer's look atit

[Robin LaFontaine <robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com>]

Yes, Rob, I think your suggestion, or something along those lines, would be a good solution, and does seem to capture the strengths of the two approaches.

1. If the generic proposal is a separate part of the standard then it is available for use in the ODF standard and elsewhere. In theory any other XML standard could adopt the generic ct proposal for change tracking, and that would seem to be a useful contribution to the XML standards world. Note that although Level 2 is directed specifically at documents, Level 1 is well suited to XML data.

2. A conformance clause, restricting where it can be used, could be implemented in the RelaxNG schema quite well, there is no need to allow a free-for-all use of the syntax everywhere. Constraining a general mechanism gives a well-defined extension route - just reduce the constraints, which seems to be easier than inventing new syntax for each new change tracking requirement.

3. There are use cases that could use this certainly - when two documents are compared it would be good to be able to represent ALL changes, for example for verification and testing, or audit control. Converting this back to a conforming document, i.e. more restricted use of the change tracking, could be done with a standard XSLT script I believe.

Robin


On 05/04/2011 14:10, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

OF13B244CC.4E15FADA-ON85257869.00477D8E-85257869.0047F7CB@lotus.com" type="cite">

Would something like this give us the benefits of both approaches:

1) Specify the complete DeltaXML generic proposal, but in its own separate 
"part" of the standard.

2) Then in the conformance clause for ODF, reference a subset of these 
capabilities for use in conforming ODF documents.  For example, we could 
enumerate the specific places in ODF where the change tracking is allowed. 
 Maybe schema annotations could be used for this.

3) In "extended ODF documents" allow the unconstrainted general use of the 
change tracking features.

This matches how we treat extensibility in ODF 1.2.  We have an unlimited 
extensibility mechanism (foreign elements) that is difficult for any 
processor to handle in a generic way.  But this is only allowed in 
extended documents.  For non-extended documents we allow only specific 
kinds of extensions, e.g., RDF metadata, application settings, etc.

-Rob


Thorsten Behrens <tbehrens@novell.com> wrote on 04/04/2011 04:50:16 PM:

you wrote:

I'm not sure if I got you correctly. You consider it problematic
that there might be change transactions in the document that do not
match basic user actions.

No. I consider it problematic that there's no limit to the
creativity in producing *atomic* changes - an application would be
perfectly allowed to delete ~all content of a huge document at once,
with only one delta:remove-leaving-content-*, and even more arcane
stuff - and you and me would end up trying to break that down to 
something Writer understands. ;)

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Robin La Fontaine, Director, DeltaXML Ltd  "Change control for XML"
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