Re: [office] Proposal for table templates

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Thursday 23 February 2006 14:22, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> David,
> 
> I have a strong preference for solution A, because it is compatible with what 
> we have today, and it does not require any table-template specific extensions 
> to the style concept. For solution B, we actually would have to add a 
> paragraph-style attribute to styles that we use for table templates only. For 
> solution C (the last one in your mail) we would add a full style family, and 
> again the style-name attributes that are only valid within table template 
> styles. And we would get incompatible.

Yes, but incompatible with table:table-template as of 1.0, which nobody implemented...
I'm being pragmatic here. I requested table-template as it is in 1.0, but didn't have time
to implement at the time, and OOo doesn't implement it, so why can't we get it right
for the future version of OpenDocument?

> In general, I think table templates should be as similar to real tables as 
> possible. 

OK, that's an argument, but then the solution B would fit as well: by adding the 
possibility for cell styles to reference a paragraph style, we can use this mechanism
both in real tables and in table templates. Especially if we can have empty table
cells without any <text:p> in them (e.g. in generated documents) - it's certainly
allowed in HTML...

> Even from this perspective, solution A seems to be best. BTW: It  
> seems to be a spelling error in the schema that the attribute is called 
> "text:style-name" rather than "table:style-name". It is called 
> "table:style-name" in the descriptive text already.

Ah; well, I think we can fix this, since as I said, nobody is using it yet.

> I agree that "table:cell-style-name" would have been a better name for the 
> attribute, but because OpenDocument is already a standard, I think we should 
> stay compatible, and should not change the name unless there are very strong 
> arguments for a change. For exactly the same reason I don't think we should 
> choose solution C.

But solution A doesn't address the need to "let the user create table-cell
styles which contain both a graphic style and a paragraph style", like we do
in KWord. For this reason I would really prefer solution B or C.

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).