RE: [office-collab] Suggestions for moving forward to resolve issues

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Perhaps there is a misunderstanding about "closeness" here.  One must presume, I think, that OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, Symphony, and anything else which relies on a common-origin code base are "close" to what ODF 1.0-1.2 say change-tracking is.  Other (that is, definitely independent) implementations either don't attempt change tracking or simply do something of their own without using the ODF 1.0-1.2 provisions.  

Also, I would distinguish between products where ODF is the "native" format and ones where ODF is supported but it is not the one that the product models primarily or best.  This makes import/export of ODF rather tricky because one has to have native change tracking and understand how to map it successfully to and from whatever it is that ODF 1.0-1.2 involve.

Also, although I didn't mention it on the call, it is meaningless for an editor to preserve XML-level markup that it does not understand if any changes are made to the document at all.  There is no way to know, in such an editor, what the ripple effects of changes that are made are with respect to the unsupported and probably unrecognized features.  

I hear the idea of passing things along repeatedly.  No one seems to notice the opportunity this creates for producing a document that is badly broken from the standpoint of the original producer software.   There are significant cross-dependencies off the hierarchy of the XML documents in an ODF document, and one doesn't know how to tell that any of them are being violated in respect to the presence of non-understood elements.

 Carrying around someone else's unrecognizable junk is simply a bad idea, especially if there are also security and privacy concerns.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Andreas J. Guelzow [mailto:andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 11:42
To: Robin LaFontaine
Cc: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-collab] Suggestions for moving forward to resolve issues

On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 10:36 -0600, Robin LaFontaine wrote:

[ ... ]

> Clearly change tracking is a big challenge, and implementing it is 
> never going to be easy. The question is whether it is that much harder 
> in the generic format than the extended one. Given the above 
> implementations, and given the fact that OpenOffice and LibreOffice 
> are probably closer to ODF, is it really an impossible problem? Can 
> someone articulate why it is difficult, and how it could be easier?

I am really not sure what the closeness of OpenOffice and LibreOffice to ODF has anything to do with this.

Perhaps I misunderstood the Koffice and Abiword implementation work, so are you saying that these were completely independent implementations (ie. without any significant communication between the two implementation groups)? 
> 
> 
> 2. Scope: should all changes be tracked or only those that editing 
> applications currently track?
> 
> There seem to be two viewpoints:
> 
> V1. Editor Feature viewpoint: CT should support the features in 
> editors, no more and no less. Therefore editor application programmers 
> need to agree on what these are and then they can be implemented in 
> ODF.
> 
> V2. Document Version viewpoint: CT should support changes to the ODF 
> representation of a document, so it should be possible to roll-back to 
> any previous version. It should be possible to track any change even 
> if a particular application cannot handle the change.

I don't see how this is possible. I f I have a sequence of changes A(recent), B(older), C(oldest) and I don't understand B how could I ever want to roll back to C!? In fact if I perform some editing how could I ever justify to resave B into a new file when I don't understnd the meaning or effect of B on a different application? 
> 
Andreas
--
Andreas J. Guelzow, PhD, FTICA
Mathematical & Computing Sciences
Concordia University College of Alberta


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