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Subject: Re: [office-comment] Change Tracking issue
Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net> wrote on 12/28/2007 11:59:39 AM: > Bryce, > > Just a quick question about a very interesting proposal: Not sure I saw a question in there. :) I think we are in basic agreement. I'm not necessarily against in-document change tracking as an option. I think it is a very poor choice because the TC would be imposing a single versioning model on the entire office app community. And then all apps must implement it. Then we have to worry about being backwards compatible--no fresh starts. I suspect the technical drawbacks, as well as the work of maintaining a "custom" versioning model which is functionally a subset of much more mature systems, will obsolete change tracking all by itself. As it dies, though, I want the option of using another system; particularly when managing large assemblages of linked content or when collaboratively authoring a paper. :) Is there anyone on the list who would object to making a "live filesystem document package" part of the official specification? Conceptually, change-tracking-in-the-document annoys me because it violates encapsulation in a domain which has already realized great benefit by embracing encapsulation. In 20 years, no one has felt the need to add source code versioning support to "vi", "emacs", "Notepad", "Eclipse/editor" or compilers for C, Java, Fortran, Python, Perl, etc. Because the "coin of the realm" is a text file, you can very cleanly separate concerns: editing and compiling are separate from versioning. Changing from CVS to Subversion does not have "ripple effects" in your editors and compilers. By adding basic versioning to a textfile office document format, the concerns are not nearly so separate: editors and processors/renderers must comprehend versioning. Ripple effects will touch everything which implements ODF, with every change to the versioning model. Bryce
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