Re: [office-collab] Wiki updates: Requirements and Use Cases (resend)

Hi Tristan,

Thanks for the feedback. I generally agree, although I think we're still looking at the implementation work differently.

I agree that implementation can be a useful step in analyzing the viability of a proposal. But this SC has never discussed the various architectural decisions that went into the DeltaXML proposal, and I think that we should build consensus on those sorts of high-level issues first, before we consider the details of possible prototype implementations.

For example, the CT stack concept allows only for accepting or rejecting changes in the order that they were made in the document. But in my own experience of how people use change tracking functionality, it is more common to go through the document and accept or reject individual changes in a different order -- perhaps in the order they appear within the flow of the document, or perhaps some other order dictated by the specific collaboration task at hand. Some changes really do stack (deleting text that was previously inserted) but that’s  an application UI issue, not a file format issue. Forcing the user to accept/reject changes in a particular order (which is essentially random, determined by the order in which collaborators happened to edit the document) seems to make change tracking more akin to a revision history, with fixed versions of the document available from specific points in time.