Re: [office-metadata] "Logical/abstract" vs. "physical" representation

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi,

I think there is a basic mis-understanding regarding flat and package 
files. The ODF specification in fact allows to store documents in a 
package, or as flat files. Both are, if you want so, two different 
(while very similar) file formats. But the flat XML file format is 
neither an abstraction of the package format nor vice versa. In 
particular, it until now has been never assumed that package formats are 
combined into a single document during processing, nor that flat files 
get separated. So, the assumption has been that users (or applications) 
decide in which of two variants a document is stored, and that packages 
remain packages while flat files remain flat files.

Having that said: IDs in fact would have to be made unique when 
transforming a package into a flat file, but since document can contain 
IDs already today, this issue is not new, and therefore should not 
influence the decision whether xml:id+rdf:about is a reasonable solution 
or not.

I hope this helps

Michael

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> 
> On Mar 5, 2007, at 7:33 AM, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - 
> Hamburg wrote:
> 
>> Actually, there are two options how one can use RDF-XML streams with 
>> flat files. The first option is to treat them as separate files, that 
>> is, there would be a flat ODF file, and in addition one or more 
>> RDF-XML files.
> 
> But that there is a more general problem with using xml:id in ODF if we 
> do not know if the files will remain separate (e.g. if they get 
> recombined in some contexts): the values are to be locally unique. That 
> leaves open the possibility that you have two package files with the 
> same xml:id values, and so when combined, you break xml:id (because you 
> have two nodes with the same value).
> 
> I suppose we could suggest assigning a UUID as the value?
> 
> Bruce
> 


-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
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