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Subject: Re: [office] Open Office XML Format TC Meeting Minutes 8-Dec-03


At 17:07 2003 12 12 +0100, David Faure wrote:
>On Friday 12 December 2003 16:55, Michael Brauer wrote:
>> Discussion of Work Package 10 Document Settings
>> -----------------------------------------------
>> The TC discussed the proposal for the representation of cursor 
>> positions. While the proposal will be suitable for representing cursor 
>> positions in office application WYSIWYG views, it won't be suitable for 
>> representing cursor positions in other views, like XML tree or text 
>> views. For this reason, the TC unanimously agreed to represent cursor 
>> positions with processing instructions. The format of the cursor 
>> position will be
>> <?openoffice cursor-position name1="value1" name2="value2" ?>,
>> that is, it will follow the XML element syntax. Applications that 
>> support multiple views can add an attribute like view-id="[view-name]" 
>> to specify to which view a cursor position belongs.
>
>Can you clarify this proposal? What are those name and values?

I'll let Michael answer that.

>How does using a processing instruction solve the problem with "XML tree or text views"?


Tools that offer a "tree or text view" (as opposed to only a
word processor view, I guess) would allow the cursor to be
positioned in locations other than just within paragraphs.

For example, an XML editor would allow the cursor to be
positioned after the end tag of one paragraph and before
the start tag of the next.

Since in such a view the cursor position could be almost
anywhere, it is not practical to use an element to represent
the cursor position (since XML doesn't allow inclusions, it
would be almost impossible to write the content models to
allow for such).  That's what led us to use a processing
instruction for the cursor position.

I note that even a processing instruction doesn't allow one
to have the cursor position be, say, within an attribute value.
So we aren't completely supporting all text views.  But personally,
I'm more worried about XML views that text views, so I don't find
this limitation a problem.  (One could, presumably, put the PI
at the nearest valid location and than add a character count
offset attribute to the PI if one really wanted to be able to
locate the cursor at a specific position within markup.)

paul




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