I've done a teeny bit of poking into how RTF handles fields, and am starting
to believe that the current AbiWord markup for this feature should be
replaced.
The current design for the <field/> tag always calculates its values
interactively, and has a very sparse set of arguments. For example:
Currently a <field ... /> is a monolithic entity.
In essence, I'm rapidly coming to believe that the FIELD tag should become a
container which surrounds the last calculated text for that field, with a
richer set of XML arguments which can be used to update that calculation
when needed. For example:
Now the <field ... >last text used</field> gets marked up differently.
I haven't dug much more than this, and don't have a proposed syntax, but
wanted to at least raise the issue for discussion.
Note that this change *would* theoretically break file format compatibility,
but I think that's a non-issue for real-life documents, since the current
support for fields is so anemic (almost broken). We've never supported any
fields in the UI, and the only sample document that I know of which uses
fields is hidden deep in the source tree.
If we're going to fix this, now's the time to do so, before anyone starts
doing the UI work.
Opinions?
Paul
