Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
Krutsch, Michael C. wrote:
We believe that there are several differences between CDOs and SXE but the
key difference is that CDOs aren't editable; not in the sense that an object
defined by SXE is. A collaborative data object is defined by a fixed schema
and the only thing that is user 'editable' are the contents of the CDO, but
not the structure of the CDO itself. There isn't a mechanism (or even a
requirement or concept) to start with a 'blank' CDO and have users define
one in real time. Once we have sufficient user feedback this might be an
issue that gets revisited, but it isn't on the radar right now. We have
source to two reference implementations (I'll post to the announce list) and
I'll also make available a set of slides to help identify the use cases and
the implementation.
That's helpful. Yes, I see that CDOs are much more structured than what
folks are trying to enable with shared XML editing.
As Ian Paterson pointed out to me a few years ago, our community
experiences a continual tug-of-war between structure and freedom. For
example:
1. We use XML, which is completely extensible, but then people want to
know what might come over the wire so we define particular namespaces
(including XML schemas to formally lock down the data formats).
2. We defined data forms (XEP-0004) as a completely free-form technology
for data interchange, but then people want to formalize their data forms
sometimes so we defined form-types (XEP-0068).
... you get the idea.
So I wonder if there is a way to define shared XML editing or remote
instance synchronization in such a way that it can meet the needs of
folks who want more free-form editing and those who want more structured
collaboration. I don't say that's necessary or that we need to meet
disparate requirements with the same technology, only that it might be
worth exploring.
In principle, a particular application type can impose any structure
that's expressible as an XML Schema just by specifying that the document
being edited must conform to the schema. I think this would include
CDOs. However, you might consider using SXE as the "transport" an
overkill for such very structured documents...
Joonas
