[publican-list] RFC: Supporting RevisionFlag attribute

[Ruediger Landmann]

On 05/07/2010 08:31 AM, misty at redhat.com wrote:
> I'm concerned about the way that this RevisionFlag feature would affect the workflow of the content authors.
>
> I don't know if everyone works the same way, but I do a lot of in-place sentence reworking. If I understand this correctly, I would need to either mark each sentence I change as revised, or mark a whole paragraph at a time as revised even if I only change a few words. I'm unclear whether I would need to copy/paste so that I'd have the old version still in the document, or how that would work.
>
> Can we please have some more info on the way this would work from the author's point of view? I do appreciate that it would make QE's (and engineering's) job easier.
>    

If you're reworking a document to send off for technical review or 
partner review, you would:

set <para RevisionFlag="Added"> on a new paragraph (or section) added to 
the doc
set RevisionFlag="Changed" for a changed paragraph or section
leave sections to delete in place for now, but set 
RevisionFlag="Deleted" on them

No need to copy and paste paras -- if the reviewer needs to refer to a 
Changed section, she or he can look at an older version of the doc. 
They're reading to see whether the doc makes sense *now*.

Whether you would bother setting it for a change of only a few words is 
questionable. I'd only set it for a change of a few words if the few 
words corrected a serious error of some kind, or it was a change 
specifically requested by the reviewer on a previous review cycle.

This parallels what we've already been doing with <remark>s, but makes 
it much clearer to reviewers as to what the changes are, while not 
increasing writers' workload over the existing mechanism.

Cheers
Rudi