Action #0016: Start Experimental Explosion of ODF 1.1 onto Wiki

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

This action item is completed.  The findings of the experiment and discussion of continuation of the effort are described on the Wiki at
<http://wiki.oasis-open.org/oic/SpecAnalysis/Discussion>.

The experiment demonstrates wikiText forms for the specification headings, text paragraphs, list, stables, images, and schema fragments.  

My recommendation is to continue development of the Specification Analysis Wiki pages.  I am offering to be the editor for that activity.

The basic findings are in five areas:

 1. Labor-Intensive Creation.  Transfer of the ODF 1.1 Specification into a hypertext document of the same content is a labor-intensive activity even though the ODF 1.1 text movement is essentially via copy-and-paste from the PDF or the ODT of the specification.

 2. Off-Line Workflow Works Best.  Building substantial hypertext documents using only the browser form is unworkable.  An alternative solution allowing off-line use of text editors and SVN to manage the wiki text, which is then pasted to the wiki, is more successful although requiring a careful workflow.

 3. Manual Synchronization is required to make sure that material directly posted to the wiki is caught in the SVN-maintained version and not trampled on when pasting a new SVN-maintained page to the wiki.

 4. Multi-Level Documentation is proposed to make the Specification Analysis usable in the simplest way appropriate for increasingly demanding cases.

 5. Tying-In OIC Content.  The separation between the specification, open discussion, and official work of the OIC TC needs to be navigated with care.  No solution to this is presented, although there is some discussion in the report on the experiment on the discussion page, <http://wiki.oasis-open.org/oic/SpecAnalysis/Discussion>.



 - Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
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