RE: [office] Proposal for lists/numbered paragraphs

["Philip Boutros" <Philip.Boutros@stellent.com>]

Hi David

When we "add" structure we are also removing the connection between the paragraph style and the list style/counter. Let say in Word I have a style called "phil" to which I have associated a list style that makes the each paragraph that has the  "phil" style display with a letter in front of it (A, B, C, etc.) When going to openoffice the list style is preserved but would have to be decoupled from the paragraph style. Plus each paragraph of the "phil" style would have to be wrapped in <list> elements. This is a loss of information because what I want as a user is that anything I style with "phil" has A, B, C, etc. in front of it. Is this information loss traumatic? Maybe not but it's real and should be addresses.

Bigger Picture
--------------
What openoffice has done with the <list> element is attempt to take the very simplest case of "numbered paragraphs" in word processors and turn them into structure so they can be easily processed. In doing so they have complicated all the other cases of "numbered paragraphs" and were forced to add a whole new mechanism to deal with "numbered headings". I again recommend we abandon this well intentioned but problematic scheme and model "lists" as the major word processors do. This not only unifies all "numbered paragraph" in the schema but also allow better transfer of the user's intention from the major word processing formats.

-Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: David Faure [mailto:faure@kde.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 1:35 PM
To: office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office] Proposal for lists/numbered paragraphs


On Monday 17 March 2003 18:35, Philip Boutros wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I am in the unfortunate position of trying to argue against Daniel's options 1 and 2 and for his option 3. While I agree that options 1 can express the formatting required to display the lists correctly, it fails to correctly capture the real semantic information in the major word processors. In all major word processors lists and numbering are closely associated with paragraph style. Going with option 1 or option 2 removes this association and loses important (from the word processor's point of view) information in the process. Without this association we are guaranteeing that a conversion from Word to OO and back to Word is significantly lossy in this area. Like it or not, numbering is not structure in any real sense in these formats, its just sophisticated style. We would be doing a disservice to the word processing community if we choose to drop this type of numbering in favor of a lossy (from the word processor's point of view) structure based list scheme purely to make XSLT writers lives easier.

Interesting....
I fail to see what is being lost in the process (of adding structure where
there might not really be one).
Do you have a more precise example of what information would be lost?

--
David FAURE, faure@kde.org, sponsored by TrollTech to work on KDE,
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