Re: [office-metadata] clarifying fields and metadata

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

On Mar 13, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Svante Schubert wrote:

> Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 13, 2007, at 10:33 AM, Elias Torres wrote:
>>
>>> I like this. Question: and we need text:meta-label because of the 
>>> read-only
>>> nature? If so, why not use text:field?
>>
>> Yeah, my question as well. It gets to the strategic vision of this 
>> proposal, really. WRT to my other note, would we use this to support 
>> conversion from OOXML structured fields, for example? If yes, should 
>> we make clear that these are "fields"?
> In the mail before I stated:
> "We might have called the element text:meta-field if this name would 
> not already make assumptions about the implementation. Furthermore, 
> usually in ODF the element name describes the content."
> Didn't we went away from the name field, as the implementation was too 
> constraint?

I'm fine with text:meta-field.

> Just a note regarding OOXML conversions although it is not on our 
> agenda.
> Whenever Sun will implement features supported by MS Office for 
> OpenOffice.org that are not supported by ODF, we will propose an 
> appropriate extension to ODF.
> We would rather introduce new ODF elements/attributes instead of using 
> metadata as it is rather an Office extension not metadata about the 
> document.

I want to make something totally clear here since I'm not sure any of 
us have ever said this explicitly: this metadata support is an answer 
to MS custom schema support (which, BTW, covers the same broad use 
cases as our work), and it will be technically-superior.

OOo already can't support MS fields, and simply saying that you will 
handle this stuff on a case-by-case basis won't work. It hasn't yet, so 
there's little likelihood it will in the future.

So I'm not saying MS or OOXML should be our focus, but let's not be 
naive. In my use case of different users collaborating on 
citation-enhanced documents, it's very, VBRY likely that one or more of 
those collaborators will be using Word. And guess what: MS implements 
citations in OOXML using custom fields and schema support. And they use 
IDs in attributes with parameter flags to configure the formatting.

So we better be able to convert between them.

:-)

Bruce