Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] My perspective. display perferct?

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

"Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com>
wrote on 07/14/2008 01:43:00 PM:
> 
> 2008/7/14 Hurley, Garry (L&I - OIT) <ghurley@state.pa.us>:
>  The application can make suggestions if it finds such situations,
but
> it should never change things without the user's consent.
> >
> > This is why I suggested we might want to concentrate on how the
> data is represented ON DISK as opposed to ON SCREEN.
> 
> 
> Is that of interest to others?
> If I create a (valid) odf document, save it to disk
> should it remain unchanged in terms of content when it passes through
> another application?
> I guess metadata will change (date last edited etc), but stuff the
user wrote?
> Should that remain 'fixed' (markup + content?)
> 
> I know open office broke a process I used when they changed one of
> their versions
> so I'm all for it.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 

I would suspect that the vast majority of useful document
processing applications will change the input document in someway, whether
by allowing editing, by correcting spelling errors, by compressing images,
by translating the text into another language, by appending material, but
replacing template text, by adding metadata annotations, by doing OCR on
embedded text in graphics to turn into accessibility hints, etc.

In fact the main advantage of an open format like
ODF is that it makes it easier to write applications that can read/write/create/modify
ODF documents.

I suspect what you really want is something like "Don't
change anything unexpected" or "Don't do anything stupid"
or "Don't make changes that the user didn't authorize", concepts
which are notoriously difficult to formulate as a provision in a standard.

-Rob