OK here goes. Bearing in mind I have come to this discussion late and may be raking over old coals.
What we can do anyway is place arbitrary marks anywhere in the document. Using <bookmark/> <fieldmark/> or whatever else you would want to call them. We can also, in most cases, relate these markers to one another, using an id attribute for example. By doing this we implicitly define ranges. The challenge is to differentiate what these ranges are for.
One of the things I fail to understand is where the value is of appending -start and -end to the names of these markers. It seems unnecessary to me. Which is the start and which is the end is anyway implicit in the order of the stream. But if it is really useful for readability, one could indicate this in an attribute eg.
<marker id="somestuff" type="fieldmarkstart"/>
....
<marker id="somestuff" type="fieldmarkend"/>
OR
<marker id="somestuff" type="fieldmark" position="start"/>
....
<marker id="somestuff" type="fieldmark" position="end"/>
Something along these lines should be sufficiently generic to easily extend to different marker types whilst preserving the logic that a marker is simply a marker and doesn't define anything structural within the xml.
Regards
Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "Florian Reuter" <>
To: ,
Cc:
Sent: Friday, May 9, 2008 1:39:35 PM (GMT+0200) Africa/Harare
Subject: Re: [office] Content Regions in ODF
Hi,
in terms of a constructive discussion it would really be great to understand not only what you don't want but also what you want.
You say its unnecessary. Can you explain why? What alternative encoding do you have in mind?
So where do you think we should invest our good money ;-)
It would really be great to understand the alternatives 'cause I'm not a big fan the start-/end- stuff either but I'm not aware of better alternatives...
Thanks very much,
~Florian
>>> Bob Jolliffe <> 05/08/08 8:05 PM >>>
Absolutely agree with the sentiment. I don't know how we orginally got into this -start -end convention, but it is really ugly and unnecessarily. Also agree it is not an odf 1.2 issue, but let us at least flag it as undesirable and avoid pouring good money after bad.
Regards
Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Durusau" <>
To: "ODF office" <>
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2008 3:46:54 PM (GMT+0200) Africa/Harare
Subject: [office] Content Regions in ODF
Greetings!
The following is not an ODF 1.2 issue but it is one that I wanted to
note for the future.
In the discussion of Florian's fieldmark proposal, Rob observed that we
have several mechanisms for marking a region of content in ODF.
Actually I have found seven of them that explicitly use the -start/-end
form for the elements names:
<text:alphabetical-index-mark-start>,
<text:alphabetical-index-mark-end>, linked by having the same value in
the text:id attribute.
<text:bookmark-start>, <text:bookmark-end>, linked by having the same
value in the text:name attribute.
<text:change-start>, <text:change-end>, linked by having the same value
in the text:change-id attribute.
|<text:index-entry-link-start>, <text:index-entry-link-end>, Note the
schema doesn't provide any attribute to bind the two elements together.
(I checked the 1.0, 1.1, and latest draft schemas.)|
<text:reference-mark-start>, <text:reference-mark-end>, linked by having
the same value in the text:name attribute.
<text:toc-mark-start>, <text:toc-mark-end>, linked by having the same
value in the text:id attribute.
<text:user-index-mark-start>, <text:user-index-mark-end>, linked by
having the same value in the text:id attribute.
They all serve different purposes but they do have in common:
1) They mark some region of content in an ODF document
2) They mark that content without regard to the XML structure of the
document
As Rob suggested earlier, it might be a good idea to think about a
single mechanism that marks portions of content with some means to
distinguish the purpose for the marking.
I can easily imagine a point plus -start/-end form of a general element
with a typing attribute that has a canonical set of values established
by the TC and that allows for a string extension so that developers can
extend the types. Thinking that could provide some means for
experimentation that is prior to the TC actually extending the list of
types with defined semantics.
As I said, not an ODF 1.2 issue but I thought the information might be
useful in the context of the fieldmark discussion.
Hope everyone is having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
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