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Subject: On "fields"
Greetings! I want to thank Michael for the excellent post on "fields" and the various uses of that term in the ODF context. It has given me much to think about and I wanted to share some observations and comments on "fields." When I think about "fields" in ODF it is mostly from experience with using OpenOffice, KOffice and more recently Lotus Symphony. So consider the following with that caveat. The most common characteristic of a "field" is that it involves some computation by the application in a particular context which results in content being inserted in the document. For example, if I set the date "field" in a footer, then every time a new page is created, that computed content (unless I am uses a fixed date) is placed in the footer. Same is true for text that is automatically inserted in some particular location, say the header for right or left hand pages. The user specifies the text and its location but the actual placement is triggered by some event, in the case of page headers, by the creation of another page where the header should appear. Needless to say that formatting styles can be associated with the content that is inserted as the result of the definition of a "field." And the "content" consists of markup as well as user specified text or other material that appears on the markup. So, to separate out some of the requirements from the prose: 1. Choice/Input of content by user 2. Placement/Location of that content in a document (actually in the markup as seen from the 'other' side) 3. Triggering event, such as occurrence of a location or occurrence of other content in a document 4. Choice of styles for the content chosen or input by the user 5. The resulting markup should, whenever possible be well-formed, to make it easier to process by standard XML tools (Yes, some users may describe what they want as paragraphs that 'span' other paragraphs but that isn't really necessary in any cases that I have seen. What they want is paragraph formatted content that may be distinguishable from the paragraphs surrounding the content, but that hardly requires 'spanning' paragraphs.) 6. Content and markup are limited only by the appropriate definition in ODF. (In other words, speaking of the general case, there is no limitation until we pronounce one. Such as saying that a date "field" contains only a date, for example. Not a limitation on a "field" generally but certainly a limitation on that particular one.) If I had to pick one that distinguishes a "field" from anything else in an ODF document I would say that it is the triggering event that makes a "field" somehow different. There is nothing that prevents me from manually entering page numbers for example and styling them much as a page number "field" but I am likely to make a mistake and it really is more convenient to have the correct page number appear as I create new pages. Otherwise, all the things we can say about a "field" are largely the same ones we could say about any other content in an ODF document. Does that seems like a useful continuation of Michael's explanation of "fields" in ODF? Hope everyone is having a great weekend! Patrick -- Patrick Durusau patrick@durusau.net Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34 Acting Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps) Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps) Co-Editor, OpenDocument Format (OASIS, ISO/IEC 26300)
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