Re: Forms Taskforce participation

On Aug 21, 2007, at 7:35 AM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>
> It's not very clear to me what exactly a "task force" is in W3C  
> context. What
> exactly is expected of the Forms Task Force?

My expectation is that the Forms Task Force is supposed to define some  
requirements for architectural consistency, which are then adopted by  
the forms facilities in HTML and XForms. As our charter says:

"The HTML WG and the Forms Working Group will work together in this  
Task Force to ensure that the new HTML forms and the new XForms  
Transitional have architectural consistency and that document authors  
can transition between them."

However, I'm not sure all task force participants will have the same  
expectation of what the task force should do. The Forms WG has the  
additional charter goal of making XForms Transitional a syntactic  
superset of HTML Forms. And some have proposed that the work of the  
Forms Task Force should be to somehow merge the two technologies into  
one thing that is published both as part of HTML and as XForms  
Transitional.

Will the Chairs of the respective working groups set the expectation  
for the goals of the Force Task Force, or is the Forms Task Force  
going to determine that itself (presumably as the first order of  
business)?


As for who should participate: I hate to think of things so  
politically, but to the extent that XForms and Web Forms 2 / HTML  
Forms are seen as opposing camps, it will be helpful to the legitimacy  
of the task force to have an equal number of advocates for the two  
positions. Ideally there would also be some who would be seen by both  
sides as neutral parties. I assume the representatives from the Forms  
WG will all be strong advocates of the XForms point of view. Are we on  
track to have a Forms Task Force whose composition will seem balanced  
to the participants and to outside observers?

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 21 August 2007 20:59:07 UTC