RE: [office-collab] Multiple changes

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

I think there are interoperability and usability issues around how much change is one change, even when made by a single person in a single session in a contiguous part of the document.

It has to do with ability to subsequently approve or reject changes.  So, while what an implementation does for equivalent changes is certainly up to the implementation, there are consequences, in interchange and in subsequent revision and review work, even by the same author.  There are also (limited) consequences in how changes are annotated and identified in terms of author, date-time, and any commentary.

These may not be significant, but they do need to be taken into consideration to ensure that it is indeed a benign matter of implementation choice.

ODF is a specification for the interoperable use of documents.  The change-tracking feature cannot escape that.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Durusau
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 06:26
To: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-collab] Multiple changes

Svante,


On 09/20/2012 08:35 AM, Svante Schubert wrote:


	Hi Patrick,


<snip>



		When forward progress of the text stops? When I stop deleting the inserted text? When the cursor has moved off the inserted text (after deletions/additions)? Or the cursor has left the inserted text for more than 5 seconds? After a save? 
		

	Why shall we care? This is absolutely an implementation detail of the application, all we have to care about is that similar changes are able to be reflected by different set(s) of operations, which all have in common that they have the same information set, resulting in the end into an equal change.
	For instance, instead of three operations:
	

	1.	insert "a" in paragraph 1 at position 1
	2.	insert "b" in paragraph 1 at position 2
		
	3.	insert "c" in paragraph 1 at position 3

	The application might as well sent one operation:

	1.	insert "abc" in paragraph 1 at position 1

[ ... ]