Details
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New Feature
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Status: Open
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Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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None
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None
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Important
Description
ABSTRACT
This feature will improve document collaboration by focusing on document changes.
It simplifies collaboration by exchanging only the document delta, thus fostering efficiency and meaningfulness.
SCENARIO
In the future when loading an ODF text document into this library, the document is being mapped to a list of high level user changes. This sequence of changes is equal to a batch of user actions, creating an equal document from the top to the bottom. 3rd party software such as web editors meant to receive this list (in JSON) to create their document representation. Similar they should gather their user changes as a similar change sequence and return them. This feature will enable the library to merge new changes back into the document.
Changes have the advantage to abstract from design details of document serialization and will remain in general on the logical level known by common users.
In addition, changes are atomic. They bundle the manipulation of sometimes scattered feature data into a single change step.
Atomicity allows two adjacent changes within the change list to be switched without requiring further context, easing the alteration of work history, such as normalization.
To allow compatibility of changes among office applications from the beginning and accelerate their development, there is an ongoing effort of standardization changes based on the ODF XML file format.
BACKGROUND
Prior to the upcoming OASIS ODF 1.3 version only the complete ODF document had been standardized. (For instance, its zipped XML files, the manifest, signature, encryption and RDF metadata).
Therefore, the only interoperable way to synchronize changes between collaborating office users was the exchange of the complete document using change-tracking. Change-Tracking is always stored within the content, requiring to process the complete document content.
This does not scale with multiple users working at the same time on a document. For instance, real-time collaboration requires instantaneous user feedback. Exchanging the complete documents on every synchronization among participants is not feasible.
Similar it is in general less transparent and less safe to receive from a 3rd party a document including their changes in opposite to exchanging the changes alone.
To alter this disadvantageous situation and be able to exchange predefined deltas of an office document, ODF changes are currently being standardized in the ODF Advanced Document Collaboration subcommittee of OASIS. An ODF change is a typical user change on "logical document parts", e.g. paragraph, image or text character. There are three change types: add, modify or delete. Every high level ODF change is going to be mapped by the specification to the manipulation of one or more XML nodes within the document. The abstraction from XML changes by these typed operation is necessary as most ODF application are not aware of ODF XML during the runtime. In contrast to HTML, ODF does not require a common model such as DOM.
The serialization of changes will be offered in JSON by this feature as the common use case is to have the ODF Toolkit in the back end, while a web based editor receives such changes and renders the document.
In addition to that, the ODF Toolkit will be capable to receive user changes made by a client to the document and merge them into the document by applying one change after the other on its internal ODF XML DOM model.