Re: [office] text:meta-field

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

"Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com>
wrote on 10/30/2007 06:46:34 AM:

> 
> What technical justification is there for breaking the xml tree model
please?
> 

Could someone please post the specific section and
paragraph number in the ODF specification which we are proposing to change?
  Remember "field" is an ambiguous term in ODF, which could
refer to either form fields (Chapter 11 "Form Content") as well
as text fields (Chapter 6 "Text Fields").  I think it will
help if we're all on the same page.

Also, I'd like to see a use case posted.  I've
seen Florian's example, but that doesn't really motivate what is being
asked for.  Is the intent, for example, to be able to have fields
that contain arbitrary rich text?  If we can nail down what the use
case is, then we can discuss the best way of achieving it.

I observe that today in OO Writer, a user can select
portions of text from two adjacent paragraphs and mark the selection as
bold.  This is stored using text:span for the bolded selection in
each paragraph.  Have we explored whether such an approach is applicable
with fields?

But I must say that I see great benefits to being
able to say that a field, of either variety, contains data of a single
type. By "type", I mean a singly rooted XML element like <p>,
a real subdocument, not a "document fragment".  For XForms
use, I believe this is mandatory.  

Introducing markup tags that cut across the logical
structure of the document in arbitrary ways would bring a large increase
in complexity to the processing of ODF.  So, let's make sure we absolutely
need this before we add it.   


-Rob