Beyond MCT Challenge #2

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

After the cases that MCT Challenges #1-#2 reflect, my attention has moved to some resiliency testing for existing implementations.

The idea is to create modified change-tracked versions of the #1 and #2 cases that handle the same cases *differently* while still legal according to the ODF schema and the specification as much as it gives any real constraints.

I haven't made those yet.  An obvious place to put them is on the ODF Interoperability and Conformance site for implementers to see how their implementations respond to change-tracking that is not what those implementations produce for these case.  The question is, does the consumer survive its encounter with a different legal representation and, better yet, does it interpret the change-tracking correctly, whether or not it preserves it in a preserved Save As ... version.

For example, it is easy to see how to modify the document in MCT Challenge #1 so that the changes do preserve the paragraph style differences of the parts that the deletion crosses.  It is possible to manually change the document so that the tracking does capture that information.  The challenge is one of what implementations do with that and are they able to avoid some sort of dramatic failure instead.

I don't have a timeline -- January is a very busy month -- but I wanted to indicate what I am curious about and want to explore further.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: office@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:office@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Dennis Hamilton
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 10:47
To: office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [office] Groups - MCT Challenge #2 (PDF) uploaded

Document Name: MCT Challenge #2 (PDF) <https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office/document.php?document_id=47560> 

________________________________

Description
This particular challenge does not expose any implementation bugs. The
persistent documents reflect valid tracked-changes in terms of the ODF
specification. That the producer chose this particular approach to
enacting the changes made by an user is appropriately
implementation-determined. The challenge is around MCT equivalents and
alternatives (if any) for the same cases and up-/down-level
interoperability.

The PDF provides a version of the description that does not require an ODF
consumer to read and evaluate.

The editable forms of the two example documents and this description are in
the Zip version. 
Download Latest Revision <https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office/download.php/47560/latest/CT-2012-11-26-1531-MCT-Challenge-02.pdf> 
Public Download Link <https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=47560&wg_abbrev=office> 

________________________________

Submitter: Mr. Dennis Hamilton
Group: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC
Folder: Miscellaneous
Date submitted: 2012-11-27 10:46:51
Revision: 1