Questions/comments concerning the Select Committee report on Change Tracking

Questions/comments concerning the Select Committee
      report on Change Tracking

      

      1. "GCT and ECT were proposed and discussed as changes to the ODF
      format for change tracking, not collaboration. In fairness to
      those proposals and to create a common basis for comparison, the
      select committee choose to compare GCT, ECT and MCT as change
      tracking proposals only."

      

      A sensible decision, in line with the TC terms of reference for
      the Subcommittee.

      

      

      2. "Without implying a decision on syntax, the select committee
      chose the ETC's feature matrix as the basis for features to be
      supported by the new change tracking features of ODF (Annex A)."

      

      Speaking as chair of the Subcommittee, there have been strong
      requests for change tracking in spreadsheets and the terms of
      reference of the Subcommittee was even wider than this. I note
      that you have added global operations and that seems very
      sensible, although useful operations such as text-to-table and
      vice versa will remain untrackable.

      

      

      3. "GCT, ECT and MCT all chose different paths but with some minor
      differences all would satisfy the change tracking use cases."

      

      Actually that is incorrect: ECT was unable to satisfy the use
      cases for spreadsheets. MCT to date has shown solutions for only a
      small set of use cases.

      

      

      4. "Having said that, however, ECT adds detailed markup in an
      attempt to make change tracking “easier” which it may do in some
      view of the format. Lack of verbosity is not a goal for XML but as
      has been seen from practical experience, performance of XML
      editors can suffer from overly verbose XML."

      

      This implies ECT was rejected on grounds of verbosity. I
      understand from our conference call that this is not the case so
      perhaps you could clarify this and be a bit more specific in
      identifying why ECT was not favoured.

      

      

      5. "GCT ... represents a great change to the ODF format. It would
      require a substantial overhead, both for XML and non-XML
      implementations of ODF. Particularly when compared to the
      operations proposal which we discuss below. The select committee
      cannot recommend GCT as the proposal to “fix” change tracking in
      ODF."

      

      This statement that GCT has a more substantial overhead than MCT
      seems to be a bold declaration, given that MCT is some
      considerable way away from being fully defined. Please would you
      add an explanation of this for the record as you are asking the TC
      to base the future direction of ODF on this.

      

      Also note that there are already two independent implementations
      of GCT which provide clear evidence that the overhead is not
      substantial. Have you dismissed this evidence, and if so please
      explain why? 

      

      

      6. "MCT has been distracting with its emphasis on collaboration
      issues in a change tracking context. It does offer the cleanest
      proposal for tracking changes in ODF documents."

      

      Please explain what you mean by "cleanest".

      

      

      7. "The first point to be made is that once operations and
      addressing are defined, the MCT change tracking proposal only
      requires an understanding of existing ODF markup. As opposed to
      specification and parsing of additional, “change tracking”
      markup."

      

      My understanding was that MCT would require a new set of markup
      (for operations and addressing) that would need to be defined for
      use in undo.xml. Each operation would have its own specific
      markup, which would need to be defined, parsed and understood by
      an application. Moreover, the application would need to understand
      and be tested against the definition of all the operations.
      Therefore, if that is correct, I suggest that this statement is
      somewhat misleading. Please provide a more detailed explanation of
      what you mean here.

      

      Robin