This paper presents work done over the past two years to provide an improved change tracking representation for documents in XML. The original intention was to provide improved change tracking for the OpenDocument format (ODF), but the approach is generic and is therefore potentially applicable to other XML document formats and even XML data.
A detailed specification was developed, and prototype implementations developed in Abiword and KWord to demonstrate interoperability. However, developers of the main ODF office packages found the approach a challenge and were less keen to implement it and are currently looking at other options. This paper presents the basic design principles behind the proposal, and how these are satisfied in the approach taken.