Hi Doug,
If you have a concrete proposal, feel free to make it. Otherwise I think
it is natural that we consider the two specifications that we have in
front of us:
1) The existing ODF 1.2 change tracking specification (essentially our
default position, if we do nothing)
2) The deltaXML proposal
Other proposals are welcome, of course.
In parallel we're also gathering requirements and use cases:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/Advanced%20Document%20Collaboration
I think your feedback so far on the high-level ramifications of a
particular model is valuable. It is good to separate the important model
issues from the issues of mere notation. So I think we're having the
right kinds of discussions.
I know that we're not following a pure "waterfall model" development, but
I think there is some value to iteration, of looking at requirements,
specification and implementation together and iterating until you've
satisfied all constraints. Such a loosely-structured approach might not
scale to extremely large efforts, but I'm not overly concerned with it
being used for this SC's modest efforts.
Before you joined the TC, we had a similar situation with OpenFormula. A
3rd party group -- the Open Document Fellowship -- noting the lack of a
detailed formula specification in ODF 1.0, drafted one on their own. They
contributed the draft to the ODF TC and some of their members joined as
well. We elected the author of that specification as SC Chair. We worked
on the draft in a SC until it was ready for inclusion in ODF 1.2. The end
result appears to have satisfied all. We're we appreciative of the
specification contributed by the Fellowship? Yes. But did we take it
as-is and refuse to change it? Hell, no. We spent a couple of years
working on the draft, including work to make sure the spec was
implementable by legacy applications. I'm hoping we can do something
similar for change tracking, albeit at a faster pace, as befits a much
shorter specification.
Regards,
-Rob
Doug Mahugh <> wrote on 01/24/2011 12:03:15 PM:
