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------- Additional comments from fred...@openoffice.org Wed Nov 18 17:55:05 +0000 2009 ------- Thanks for the response. But it does not answer any of the substantive points made by the contributors: "How relative URIs behave is defined in the ODF specification... Essentially, relative URIs are resolved ... as they would be if th ODF document would be ... a folder with the name of the zip file". The way that OO documents are internally represented (viz, as a zip of a subdirectory of a collection of component files) is an implementation detail: as such, it should be totally invisible to a user. If the present OASIS spec suggests that an end user needs to write relative references wrt this hidden subdirectory, then this aspect of it is in need of urgent revision. (It is as if page numbers had to be expressed in hexadecimal simply because, internally, they are represented in binary!). "... To reference a file outside of a zip file, one has to add "../"." In common with one of the contributors (and with others in the OO User Forums), I have found that any attempt to specify a relative URL, result either in the generation of an HREF link (as visible in the content.xml file) that is null, or that treats the given target filename as the hostname in a URL. For example, specifying the target as foo.html (or as ./foo.html or as ../foo.html) results in either an HREF of "" (ie, null) or of "http://foo.html"; (a hostname with a null pathname). Worse than that, however, it sometimes displays it (as a tooltip, when hovered over) as a null and then, when the .odt file is saved and then reopened, it displays it in the other form. Although (thanks to the explanation you offered about the purpose of the "Save URLs relative to" options), I have managed to generate relative URLs with the "file" access scheme, I have not managed (despite exhaustive experimentation) to do so with the "http" scheme. "Documents in OOo always contain absolute URIs only." It looks as if it is this decision that is at the root of the problem. (As an aside: it is incomprehensible how this decision was arrived at: unless relative links can be expressed, a collection of documents is forever rooted to its original file location.) The consequences of this decision have given rise to a quite unnecessary explosion of complexity and attendant implementation bugs. "OOo provides two alternative ways to add hyperlinks. Why should this be an issue?" One approach (via Format) offers the possibility of associated events and macros, and a choice of link styles; the other (via the Hyperlink tool) offers a much richer set of link schemes. The relation between these two mechanisms is far from obvious to the casual user (maybe they generate different kinds of link??). "Summary: There is no defect" Sorry, I disagree: there are defects with both the underlying conceptual scheme for relative links and with its implementation. These problems appear to have been around for a long time (eg, see Issue 56629 from 2005). My own summary: Overall, OpenOffice is superb in concept and well implemented in practice. But, in failing (in both specification and implementation) to handle relative links between documents, it excludes itself from other than single-document tasks. I repeat my original plea (that a clear simple specification should be written for the handling of relative and absolute URLs, that the existing mechanism should be stripped out in its entirety, and that it be replaced with a simple, clean implementation). --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@sw.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: issues-h...@sw.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: allbugs-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: allbugs-h...@openoffice.org
