Change tracking requirements for other XML formats, e.g. DITA

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

We need to be aware of other initiatives in this area, specifically in OASIS DITA committee. There was a birds-of-a-feather session at the recent DITA North America conference and I was invited to this and made some notes, which they have made available on their wiki, see http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/ChangeControlWiki . There is a fair bit of other comment there about change control and change tracking.

It is not clear where this will go at the moment. It may be that the OpenDocument requirements are a bit different from the others because the editing applications for OpenDocument are not general XML editors, but there is a lot of common ground. And of course it is always good to have a common standard if that is appropriate.

The dream solution might be a common standard which can be specialized for different XML formats/schemas and has three equivalent representations for changes: in element/attribute markup, processing instructions, and an external XML form (the three would need to be semantically equivalent with automated transformation between them).

Robin