Deferred Well-Formedness and Validity

This proposal emerges out of conversations about introducting collaborative editing into OpenDocument Format (ODF) applications, as a type of change tracking. Vis-a-vis a document, a lone author is a lesser and included case of collaborative editing. In either case, changes have to be captured, along with their metadata, and reconciled, in the case of conflicting edits. Despite progress on the software side of collaborative editing for a variety of formats, there has been no visible progress on the capturing of changes, or their reconcilation in OpenDocument Format documents. Being habituated, not to say addicted, to markup approaches, it's understandable I find the lack of format discussions disquieting. It's all well and good to have change tracking/collaborative editing, successfully in software, but what the hell am I going to write down in ODF? How to capture changes, from one or many authors, and how to capture reconciliations are the focus of this proposal. That requires unique identification of changes (one or many authors), identifying where changes may be applied, and recording the application of changes (the resulting document).