Re: [office-metadata] Finding a common proposal..

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

On Dec 6, 2006, at 9:45 AM, Svante Schubert wrote:

>> Moreover, you are being inconsistent: doing what you are asking about 
>> requires us to use an RDFa-like mechanism.

> Why? What design implies my suggestion?

Because you are saying that all metadata-related visible content must 
be encoded as such (as metadata). You are not allowing me to have a 
plain text label that stands in for that. Therefore, you will force me 
to use a mechanism like RDFa (e.g. some sort of attributes on existing 
content elements) without any clear benefit for my use case.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it is unworkable to say that 
metadata cannot be encoded in content.xml. It's not possible to cover 
our use cases without allowing that and defining how to do it.

Moreover, it's unworkable to do it in any other way than using 
attributes on existing (hard-coded) odf elements (and maybe adding a 
new field for this). The alternative is to allow arbitrary elements in 
content, and that won't fly.

So the real question becomes *which* attributes.

>>>> Nevermind RDF and such; just go back to BibTeX. This proposal just 
>>>> uses the same approach, but updated for the 21st century. It's also 
>>>> the same basic approach MS is using in Word 2007/ OOXML (again, 
>>>> minus the RDF).
>>> The argument that others do it as well is only valid for real 
>>> standards. In relation of MS only interoperability counts for us.
>>
>> The argument is based on the fact that it works; it's been proven for 
>> decades.
>>
> Never change a running system, right?

Ahem, the existing ODF/OOo system as it related to citations and their 
metadata is broken, which is why I have spent the past few years trying 
to fix it (work, BTW, for which I get absolutely no professional 
rewards). So change where there is good reason, sure.

But I'm not going to ignore examples that work (BibTeX, RDFa, 
Microsoft's approach) just for the sake of it either.

Bruce