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

[Florian Reuter <florian.reuter@gmail.com>]

Hi Patrick,

sorry for the late response.

Wrt. to your 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?

If you mean meta-information about the change's author, grouping etc.
of course. I'm not quite sure why you assume otherwise.

> 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.

Hmm ---- interesting. I think ODF MetaData are powerful enough for
sure ;-) However change tracking is a quite substantial part of an
office format. Maybe moving change tracking to meta-data kind of makes
them a "second-class citizen" compared to the "first-class ODF tags"
and forces everyone to implement ODF MetaData --- which nobody has
done yet I think.

In my opinion the existing ODF style mechanism can be used. In other
words: We could use the same mechanism as e.g. marking a text "hidden"
to attach change-tracking and change-tracking-meta-data.

I think these are all valid options. I just wanted to point out in my
mail that I think ODF change tracking should be done at the "ODF
level" (i.e. tacking user imposed changes) rather than at the "XML
level" (i.e. tracking ODF/XML changes) or at the text level (i.e.
using LCS-based diff). And I still believe that a decent ODF change
tracking can be build upon the existing ODF change tracking.

Thanks for the feedback,

Florian


On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>