Levels of change tracking

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

Oliver raised an interesting question at our last meeting about 
modification of ODF files by less than full monty change tracking 
applications.

I would assume, for example, an XSLT script that removes empty 
paragraphs. Or one that removes editorial notes, ;-), would be quite 
similar.

One way to address that concern, I suspect, would be levels of change 
tracking conformance.

I am not wedded to the terminology, etc., but here is a thumb's sketch 
of what that might look like:

1) Level 1 Change Tracking Support

a) application does not display changes for acceptance/rejection

b) application displays such portion of the file as it is designed to 
display, in its final form. That is as if all changes have been accepted.

c) if the application makes changes to the file, those changes are 
reflected in the file (whether the changes are display or not being an 
issue for the application), and appended to the "changes.file" in the 
standardized format.

2) Level 2 Change Tracking Support

a) application displays changes for acceptance/rejection

b) if the application makes changes to the file, those changes are 
reflected in the file (whether the changes are display or not being an 
issue for the application), and appended to the "changes.file" in the 
standardized format.

3) Level 3 Change Tracking Support

a) application displays changes for acceptance/rejection

b) if the application makes changes to the file, those changes are 
reflected in the file (whether the changes are display or not being an 
issue for the application), and appended to the "changes.file" in the 
standardized format.

c) the application displays to the user advanced change tracking 
features, such as identification of identical "moved" text, etc.

True, there could be applications that don't append to the changes.txt 
file but I think that is the minimum that can be supported and still 
called supporting change tracking.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Former Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

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