Re: [office] The desirability of xml:id stability

[Svante Schubert <svante.schubert@gmail.com>]

On 05.02.2013 14:26, Michael Stahl wrote:

On 05/02/13 04:38, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

...

It seems to me that there is a lot more to clean up before xml:id
stability becomes important.  It is my considered opinion that any
such stability should be left to implementations and only if there is
some sort of outcry for the need for interoperable implementation in
a standard-specified way should anything be done about it at the ODF
TC.  And yes, an ODF 2.0 would likely be the place to address
significant breaking differences with respect to ODF 1.x.

as an aside, from an RDF metadata perspective a more serious open
question is that when some content element is copied, the copy/paste of
the RDF metadata referencing that element via its xml:id is left
completely unspecified by ODF, which is unlikely to yield similar
results in different implementation.  (the problem is that the RDF
graphs have no "natural hierarchy" (they are not trees), and of course
by the very nature of the feature ODF implementations cannot assume
particular semantics of the RDF properties that happen to be used in
some file.)

The copy/paste of RDF metadata is unspecified as the behavior depends on the type of metadata (=> meta-metadata?).
For instance:

1. If I had been the original author of a paragraph and the paragraph is being moved, I will be still the original author and the metadata should/will be kept.
2. If the metadata does instead represent the position of the paragraph, it have to be adapted/removed, if the paragraph itself is being moved (copy/pasted).

Either only the module/plugin knowing about the metadata can handle the metadata correctly, or my suggestion we require some meta-metadata, as "moveable" that makes it understandable for third party software, as the office itself.

Ceterum censeo, the xml:id is like a public API for a document, the removal/change during a load/save roundtrip is similar to changing the anchor IDs of an HTML page, breaking all references into the document.

Best regards,
Svante