RE: [office-comment] Proposal for new document element, "Document history"

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

Michiel,

Thanks for your extensive elaboration of what you have in mind and what experience there is.

I have one simple question after a quick read-through:

You say that " ODF already has the version mechanism that allow to save multiple versions of a document alongside in one document container; adding a new version provides a crude form of document history. But the versions are disjunct - it is not clear what the one has to do with the other."

I concede that, since ODF packages use Zip as a carrier, there is nothing to prevent other versions of a document from being incorporated in some manner.

However, I know of no provision in the ODF specification that recognizes such a mechanism.  In fact, since there is a single manifest for any package, and there can only be one top-level content.xml file, it is not clear to me what interchange arrangement is supported.  (Indeed, some consumers would likely delete extraneous content on which there is no apparent dependence, often for security reasons and especially if some reasonably serious digital signing is to be done.)

Can you say more about that, or is it an "out-of-band" arrangement that does not rely on any provision of ODF other than its being neutral on the matter?

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Michiel Leenaars [mailto:michiel.ml@nlnet.nl] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2011 14:14
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org; office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-comment] Proposal for new document element, "Document history"

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ODF already has the version mechanism that allow to save multiple versions of a document alongside in one document container; adding a new version provides a crude form of document history. But the versions are disjunct - it is not clear what the one has to do with the other.
Also, as it essentially duplicates a document with every version, in large documents this is costly regarding size.

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