[issue] keeping subject/object associations

["Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com>]

I've been chatting a bit with Michael off-list, and I think I'm
understanding better his (and maybe Svante's) concerns. To quote him:

> Let's take copying the text "Michael Brauer" that has some metadata assigned as an example. If the user does so because she or he really wants to duplicate the text, it is probably valid to copy the matadata. But if the user then replaces "Michael" with "Tom", the example breaks.

Let me just pull out what I think Michael means by "breaks." I think
he's worried that the relationship between the sibject and the object
breaks. The user here means for the property to refer to a subject
different than the first span.

Is that fair Michael?

> The situation gets more worse if the metadata is maintained by a component that is not installed, and there the user has no idea what the metadata means.

Here's what Bernd is (probably rightly) wanting to be the separate
plug-in issue.

> That's actually another reason why I think linking metadata to the content by ids (and the classes you have suggested) may have advantages. For ids, it is clear that they must not be copied. An application may however create a new id, and may call the metadata component if installed to inform it that the new id exists. The meta data component than may take the action that is appropriate. The office application does not need to know about it. All it knows and has to care about are the ids. For classes, we may define a similar behavior.

So maybe we ought to narrow down the problem here to an implementation
question of how to preserve the relationships between subjeccts and
objects, in a context where users may be copy-and-pasting -- and
otherwise modifying -- metadata-enhanced content? Can we agree on
that?

Bruce