Revisions

A revision provides a mechanism for storing information about the evolution of the document (i.e., the set of modifications made to a document by one of more authors). When an application adds revisions to the content of a WordprocessingML document, depending on the revision type they are specifying this by storing either:

• The current state of the document (a deletion stores the current state of the text as deleted, and implies that its original state was the content that used to exist)

• The initial state of the document (a run's initial properties are explicitly stored in a previous run properties block, as the current run properties are always those that are the child of the <rPr> element

A revision consists of two required pieces of information:

• The revision type (specified via the name of the revision element)

• A unique revision identifier (used to uniquely identify revisions)

As well as optional information:

• The author of the revision

• The date and time of the revision

A revision is stored using the inline annotation format or the property annotation format.

Consider a paragraph of text in a WordprocessingML document in which one word has been inserted, as follows:

This paragraph has the word text marked inserted as a revision, and is represented as the following WordprocessingML:

<w:p>
  <w:r>
    <w:t>Some</w:t>
  </w:r>
  <w:ins w:id="0" w:author="Joe Smith" w:date="2006-03-31T12:50:00Z">
    <w:r>
      <w:t>text</w:t>
    </w:r>
  </w:ins>
</w:p>

The <ins> element contains all of the content that shall be treated as revision marked as inserted (i.e., the word text).

This means that it contains both required pieces of information: the revision type, specified by the name of the revision element (<ins>); and a unique revision identifier of 0.

The element also stores the optional information about the revision: the word text was inserted by Joe Smith on March 31, 2006 at 12:50 pm.

Within a WordprocessingML document, the following types of revisions can be used to track the changes to a document (each annotation's form in parentheses):

• Insertions (inline annotations for run content, property annotations for tables and paragraphs)

• Deletions (inline annotations for run content, property annotations for tables and paragraphs)

• Moves (inline annotations)

• Changes to run/paragraph/table/numbering/section properties (property annotations)

• Changes to custom XML markup (property annotations)