Re: [office-comment] c/o office-collab: Regarding ODFCollaboration.

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Florian,

Good to hear from you!

On Mon, 2011-01-24 at 22:36 +0100, Florian Reuter wrote:
> Dear Advanced Document Collaboration SC,

<snip>

> An alternative approach to get cool OT-ready collaboration to ODF:
> 
> Very simple:
> (a) Clarify the existing change tracking. Make sure people understand
> that <p>Hello <changed-start/>World<changed-end/></p> represents an
> operation Insert(“World” at the position 6 of the paragraph). With
> that information applications can implement decent OT-based
> collaboration.
> (b) Simply add markup for missing operations like: Insert-Row,
> Delete-Row, Insert-Cell, Delete-Cell, Move-Text, etc. The only
> challenge here is to find a comprehensive list of operations.
> 

Couple of questions:

1) Should improvements to change tracking be limited to operations on
the document? In other words, shouldn't change tracking encompass
metadata such as the change author, date, position (in a series of
changes) and the like? 

2) Should change tracking be moved to metadata and hence possibly to
outside of the document storage? Perhaps by specialized applications?
Thinking that storing XML-based change tracking in the document places a
real burden on the primary application.

If #1 was implemented, then display of changes by change author, perhaps
with further annotations would be possible.

Such as exposing a copy of an ODF draft to which members of the TC or
public can directly add their comments, the TC/editor can respond to
them and then finally the agreed upon changes entered. 

Now that is change tracking for a standards process!

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick