Re: [office] word-count (was Re: [office] Data Grid Size element proposal)

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

"Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca> wrote on 11/24/2008 
05:59:28 PM:
>
> 
> But why is this information saved in the file? 

The reason is probably lost in the mists of time.  This information has 
always been stored in documents going back to precursor binary formats 
since the late 1980's.  It may come from common librarial practice, where 
records of hard-copy resources would include the size of the book (in 
inches and in pages) as well as title, author, subject, etc.  My guess is 
they added word-count to electronic documents as an analogue to that 
practice.  Remember in those days as well, the document format itself 
might be proprietary and undocumented, but in Windows at least it was 
common to store the metatadata as OLE Properties, which could be quickly 
retrieved without understanding the underlying document format.  So that 
would be useful for search engines, document servers, etc., and any other 
programs that operated on the document metadata.

But that is all in the past.  The same constraints don't necessarily exist 
today.  In particular, with a standard document format, the entire 
contents of the document is open for reading/scanning, not just the 
metadata.

On the other hand, I don't see any reason to remove these features from 
ODF, since there may be applications that use them.

-Rob