Re: [office-metadata] meta-field and more...

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

On May 9, 2007, at 3:40 PM, Elias Torres wrote:

> This is how I understand it:
>
> Long, long ago, in ODF, we had text:date-field, text:creator-field,
> text:whatever-field. This is very cumbersome and doesn't scale. We had 
> to
> wait for each ODF specification revision/iteration to get new fields.

Yes.

> Hence, we are proposing text:meta-field. A field that's extensible via 
> our
> metadata specification.

Right.

> So a couple of questions:
>
> - How do we define this new construct (text:meta-field) ?
>
> - How is this ANY different from <text:span
> xml:id="foo">2005-01-02</text:span> ?
>
> In my opinion the only difference is that span is user-editable and the
> field is read-only. That should be our definition.

+1

> Now to the disagreement part....
>
> First, Svante mentioned that there were some objections in defining it 
> this
> way.

Who has made what "objections"?

> I would like to revisit it. My main argument is that if it's not the
> behavior of the field (editable vs. read-only) then there's nothing (at
> least semantically) that makes them different and if not, we should 
> toss
> away text:meta-field.
>
> Secondly, Svante would like to define a binding/attaching mechanism for
> plugins to text:meta-field.

Can you or Svante explain a little more exactly what this means?

I should add here we discussed a little bit a couple weeks ago how we 
might ensure some consistency in an otherwise flexible system. Rob 
suggested we might consider informative notes of sorts. I like that 
idea.

Bruce