W3C Forms teleconference November 16, 2011

* Present

Steven Pemberton, CWI (chair)
Philip Fennell, MarkLogic
Uli Lissé, DreamLabs
Leigh Klotz, Xerox (minutes)
Nick van den Bleeken, Inventive Designers
Erik Bruchez, Orbeon [arrived late]

* Agenda

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2011Nov/0022.html

* Test 10.8.e needs work

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2011Nov/0019.html

Steven Pemberton: I think we should take him up on the propagation="stop" test offer.
Steven Pemberton: These are tests for XML Events.
Steven Pemberton: "the schema allows event attributes on the model element." Yes.
Steven Pemberton: "We interpreted this test to mean that the defaultAction for the custom-event was to be cancelled on the model element." Hmmm.
Leigh Klotz: The test has ev:defaultAction="cancel" on it.
Steven Pemberton: Yes, but as he rightly says, a custom event doesn't have a default action. So you can only use inbuilt events.
Nick van: It's a bit strange that the event listener is registered on the model; why should the action get executed?
Steven Pemberton: It's dipatched to the model; there's a listener on the model for that event.
Nick van: If you remove the defaultAction="cancel" why should the message be shown? There is no event handler on the action.
Steven Pemberton: Right. This example needs work.
Nick van: There should be a custom event listener on the action but the observer should be the model.
Steven Pemberton: It is by default as it's a child of the model. All the same, cancelling it isn't going to work because it doesn't have a default action; the default action happens after all handlers are done. A handler is allowed to switch off the default action if it wants to block it for whatever reason.
Nick van: But not for custom events.
Steven Pemberton: As there isn't one. You have to use an event with a default action.
Nick van: This is testing cancel of custom events. If I define an event with a default action couldn't I have one?
Steven Pemberton: An implementation could have a default action. But an event dreamed up in the form itself doesn't.
Nick van: So I don't think you can test it.
Steven Pemberton: If this is testing for cancel, you can cancel a non-custom event.
Nick van: This is testing cancel of custom events.
Leigh Klotz: 10.8.f tests cancel of predefined events.
Nick van: If there is no default action and you cancel it there is nothing to do.
Leigh Klotz: It did everything it was supposed to, which is nothing.
Steven Pemberton: "we assumed that any handler for the given event is to be cancelled on the current element.b" That's wrong, but our test is wrong as well.
Steven Pemberton: This test is harmless but useless.
Leigh Klotz: Perhaps we should put in a comment that says that if custom-event had a defaultAction in the implementation it would be cancelled.
Nick van: It's wrong as is because you won't see the custom-event message. But really you won't see it because nobody's listening.
Leigh Klotz: It's like those things in the garden that scare away tigers.
Steven Pemberton: We can either deprecate the test or fix it. We can't leave it as is.
Leigh Klotz: The easiest fix is to put in a listener on action and change the text to say that you must see the message and must not see defaultAction execution of custom-event.
Steven Pemberton: Do we want to do that then? I can do it.
Nick van: I have it open and can do it now. I will move the event to the action and say you must see the custom event, but you must not see...
Steven Pemberton: Any custom-event defaultAction.
Steven Pemberton: I'll answer the message.
Leigh Klotz: This is an XML Events conformance issue and doesn't affect XForms 1.1 conformance.

ACTION-1844 Steven Pemberton to reply to http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2011Nov/0019.html saying the test is being rewritten, and to accept the offer of new tests.

Resolution 2011-11-16.1: In test 10.8.f, when you activate the Fire Custom Event trigger you must see a custom-event message. If an implementation has a default action for the custom event you must not see the effect of the default action.

* model/@src use cases

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0003.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0004.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0005.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0017.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0018.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0019.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0020.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Apr/0021.html

Leigh Klotz: Are we dropping this in favor of subforms? The proposal from betterForm. Alain is implementing subforms in XSLTForms as well. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/wiki/Load_Embedding model/@src is static and comes with the problems of having to deal with conflicts. load embedding comes with the same cost but provides dynamic control.
Erik Bruchez: [joins]
Nick van: This allows you to define a point where you can insert another form? Is there any communication between the master form and the child form?
Leigh Klotz: At the editorial meeting in Palo Alto we said events work and it's just as if the model and UI were already there, so whatever communications you would use in that case works.
Nick van: What about initialization events?
Leigh Klotz: We didn't say anything. We'll see what betterForm and XSLTForms do.
Nick van: What about repeat?
Leigh Klotz: Good issue. Why don't you add them to the wiki page?
Leigh Klotz: I believe we can wait for Alain's proposal which is simpler and then we will have somethng to compare with the betterForm proposal.

Resolution 2011-11-16.2: We drop the model/@src proposal in favor of load embedding and await a second implementation to compare.

* XForms 1.1 xforms-select event

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2011Oct/0001.html Orbeon has a special-purpose control for this; is it just appearance or are there semantics: http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xbl-components/dialog-select

Erik Bruchez: Currently, we don't say we need to dispatch UI events during initial creation ofUI. I think that is a problem, but if were to say that xforms-select must be dispatched for cases, we should also handle it for other UI events.
Leigh Klotz: Somehow this just led us to xxf:dialog-select.
Erik Bruchez: xforms-select is dispatched in switch/case and also item in an itemset, in two cases. So the dialog select is just a selection control.
Leigh Klotz: Does xxf:dialog-select have semantics or is it just presentation?
Erik Bruchez: It's just an appearance but not done using @appearance.
Steven Pemberton: What is separator=", "? It's an extension?
Erik Bruchez: Yes, it's an XBL component, so it does what you want.
Leigh Klotz: OK, so it's just a different presentation. Somehow we got to this from the original message.
Steven Pemberton: Does separator affect parsing?
Erik Bruchez: If you select two and seven, when you say confirm, it says how it's represented in the page.
Steven Pemberton: When the instance is initialized, and this control is set up, does it use that separator to identify the initial values.
Erik Bruchez: No, this is related only to the label.
Leigh Klotz: So this is the format string for how this control looks on the page when the dialog is closed.
Steven Pemberton: I see. One of the less handy things about our select is that we can't handle values with spaces in them. But if you had a separator.
Leigh Klotz: I bet if we had XPath 2 we could do that with a sequence, but it wouldn't be free.
Erik Bruchez: I don't think XPath 2 would help storing. You could use a regexp or anything to create an itemset. But you don't have control over storing back. You'd have to specify something at the XForms level. It's been suggested; many controls might benefit from having a general mechanism to convert to instance value. encode/decode or format, for all controls. Then you could encode the values when storing them. I think that's something needed.
Leigh Klotz: That's what I meant. Don't do it with some attribute language, but instead use XPath 2. And then the extra work is writing the converter that goes back.
Erik Bruchez: Certainly we shouldn't assume XPath 1. It's 12 years old.
Leigh Klotz: I think we should write this up. A double-direction encode/decode filter pair of XPath expressions.
Steven Pemberton: For lists?
Leigh Klotz: As Erik says, for all controls. Erik do you have a proposal?
Erik Bruchez: http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xforms-other-extensions#TOC-Default-formatting
Erik Bruchez: Right now it only works on output.
Erik Bruchez: <xforms:input format="expr1" unformat="expr2">
Erik Bruchez: I think we have something further on this
Steven Pemberton: XML has lexical and value spaces.
Leigh Klotz: This seems like a middle level.
Erik Bruchez: We say that the control itself can deal with space-separated tokens. The idea would be to say that the instance has space-separated tokens and a bi-directional converter. Many times users ask for non-ISO date formats in the instance. So I could imagine a similar conversion system. It's like a data layer.
Leigh Klotz: Exactly. It sounds like a different layer.
Erik Bruchez: Then you have presentation to the user; there's parsing of the values. We have this for date and time; you can enter dates in various configurable formats: you can type "today". Then we produce the ISO date as the output. Ideally XSLT 2, format strings, etc.
Steven Pemberton: Sounds like a good discussion point for a potential features.
Leigh Klotz: It sounds like two different features here.
Erik Bruchez: I think that's right.
Leigh Klotz: There's two and from the instance data, and to and from the presentation.
Erik Bruchez: https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/blob/master/src/java/org/orbeon/oxf/xforms/control/controls/XFormsInputControl.java#L51
Steven Pemberton: What do we call it in the wiki?
Leigh Klotz: I don't know if it's one or two things yet
Erik Bruchez: One is to convert from the control to the instance. The gist is a conversion from the control to the data.
Steven Pemberton: You might use it with spaces in a credit card number, so it would have no spaces in the instance and be valid?
Erik Bruchez: That's one of the use cases. It was a few months ago. One use case is an XBL number control with formatting options. Currency might include commas and periods, but in the instnace you would want a canonical decimal. Unformat goes from the value shown to the data to clean the data. That's at the data layer but specified on the control.
Steven Pemberton: You could add it in the model.
Erik Bruchez: We often have things at both.
Steven Pemberton: Would you start off an initial page.
Leigh Klotz: I'll start a page that says there are two things.

* IRC Minutes

http://www.w3.org/2011/11/16-forms-minutes.html

* Meeting Ends