Musings on immutable change tracking

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

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Greetings!

While debugging my extraction of revision material from ISO 29500, it
occurred to me that treating the contents (save for a change log) as
immutable, could have some real advantages for applications.

For example, if the document displayed to a user for reading and/or
editing is original + changes, then when a user "saves" the document,
the application only has to append to the changes log.

Meaning of course that a digitally signed content.xml file continues
to bear its original signature. Yes?

More advanced applications could request only a portion of an
immutable document, so I would not have to wait for an iPhone to
scroll through hundreds of pages of no interest to me, before reaching
the portion I want to read/edit.

Or in secure environments, the document I "see" for reading and/or
editing, may or may not be the same document you "see."

Not so much a question of immutability but moving from a vision of
documents as BOM to EOF, to a more dynamic view, enabled by immutability
.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Patrick

- -- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Technical Advisory Board, OASIS (TAB)
OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau

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