Your office-comment: Semantics of "loading" (ODF all versions)

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

Alex

Concerning this question and your earlier observation about scripts in ODF
Documents
(http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200903/msg00001.html),
I don't think this is fixable.

It seems to me that saying anything about what a script does and when it
does it, except for UI event listening, is pretty meaningless in the ODF
specifications and it is probably really all just implementation-defined in
the current texts.  

Considering that there is no specified Document Object Model for use among
scripts, and no differentiation between manipulation in an instantiated DOM
versus the persisted ODF Document representation, timing and restrictions on
timing are simply non-actionable as normative statements.

I suppose one could presume an XML DOM based on the <office:document> (the
single XML document representation of an ODF document) that even packages
might correspond to.   

Unfortunately, the mapping is incomplete (there being features of packages
that have no <office:document> counterpart), some implementers regret
<office:document> is in the specification at all (even though it is the
closest we have to something that has a leverageable DOM), and the mapping
cannot be carried out literally because of problems with URIs that refer to
(fragments of) package components and prospects of collisions of ID-valued
attributes from the separate XML document parts. 

Absent an ODF document model (as opposed to the XML infoset that applies
only at the level of individual parts), it seems to me that the safest thing
to do in ODF 1.2 is to declare scripts and similar oddities of the
specification to be (1) implementation-determined and (2) confined to
extended ODF documents.  

Since this is clearly a broken extension point in the specification, this
would also be a good place to attempt complete removal for future return
when we actually have something useful to say here.  I am not making book on
any of those prospects.

That's my top-of-head thinking, for what it's worth.  I can imagine this gap
being filled by an effort comparable to the OpenFormula work, or carried out
by a rump consortium (e.g., like a Sun-Microsoft-IBM submission to W3C) that
works up an implementable, demonstrable specification and proposes it for
future incorporation.

I suppose this might better be a blog point-counterpoint than here.  

Any further thoughts on this, Alex?

 - Dennis

This message is my personal observation and any similarity to an official
position of the ODF TC or of OASIS is purely coincidental.  Were there such
an official position, there'd be provision of a link to the official minutes
or other approved document where the official position is expressed.

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org  

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Brown [mailto:alexb@griffinbrown.co.uk] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200903/msg00065.html
Sent: Thursday, March 05, 2009 01:38
To: office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [office-comment] Semantics of "loading" (ODF all versions)

Dear all,

2.13 had:

----b
Scripts must not modify a document while the document is loading.
However, scripts may recognize events immediately after a document is
loaded.
----e

What are the semantics of "loading" and "loaded" in ODF?

* Does this imply an ODF processor has to transfer an entire ODF
document into memory associated with an application process before
"loading" is complete, and at that point the document becomes "loaded". 

* Is an ODF processor/script then free to perform _any_ modification it
wants on that loaded resource? 

* Does this model preclude paged/streamed/shallow-loaded treatment of
ODF documents?

A loading model must be formally defined for these kinds of normative
statements to be meaningful.

Again, a formal terms and definitons section for ODF covering such
things may help to improve the overall document quality.

- Alex.

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