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Comment by floating-io | Hacker News Reader

An interesting skim, but it would have been more meaningful if it had tackled text documents or spreadsheets to show what additional functionality would be enabled with those beyond "versioning".

Maybe it's just me, but I see the presentation functionality as one of the less used aspects of the OpenOffice family.

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What he listed as the first improvement, "Replace ZIP with SQLite" would certainly apply to the other ODF formats.

He advocates breaking the XML into smaller pieces in SQLite. I suppose making each slide a new XML record could make sense. Moving over to spreadsheets, I don't know how ODF does it now, but making each sheet a separate XML could make sense.

Thinking about Write documents, I wonder what a good smaller unit would be. I think one XML per page would be too fine a granularity. You could consider one record per chapter. I doubt one record per paragraph would make sense, but it could be fun to try different ideas.

Splitting the presentation into multiple fragments makes it more difficult to generate/alter a presentation using xslt.

> I think one XML per page would be too fine a granularity.

If I add a 1/3 page graphic on page 2, it'd have to repaginate pages 2-n of that chapter, modifying n-1 XML files...

While reading I was musing one way to handle text could be to use a linked list format as storage? To make it work like that, you’d need the editor to work on a block concept and I don’t think document editors work like that?

Spreadsheets might be a little easier because you can separate out by sheet or even down to a row/column level?

Part of me wants to try it now…

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