As mentioned in the previous note, I like the idea of creating inheritable document-level PROPS:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/May/0384.html Note, however, that we're also going to need a parallel mechanism for *user-visible* document-level metadata (as displayed in those infamous tabbed dialogs.) Unlike the css-like PROPS we already have, these tend to be: - much more verbose, - localized, and - can even include line and paragraph breaks. Thus, this metadata will need more verbose XML markup than PROPS just to accomodate the more complex content model. Since this stuff gets edited using a separate mechanism anyhow (the dialog), it makes sense to store them separately too. For example, just before/after the <styles> block, we could add something like: <metadata> <m label="Summary">Secret plans for world domination</m> <m label="Pages">273</m> <m label="Author">Abi the Ant</m> <m label="Role">Evangelist</m> <m label="Organization">AbiSource</m> ... </metadata> In short then, we need *two* orthogonal sets of document-level attributes: - PROPS for the formatter - METADATA for the user and/or indexing software Hopefully no developers will get too confused by the fact that that the latter may well be accessed via a "File / Properties..." menu item. ;-) Paul, still thinking about file formats
