[Draft] Response to Last Call comment

Dear Mohamed,

The WebCGM Working Group has reviewed the comments you sent [1] about the 
WebCGM 2.1 Second Last Call Working Draft [2] published on 04 June 
2009.  Thank you for having taken the time to review the document and send 
us comments.

The Working Group's response resolution to your comment is included below.

Please review it carefully and acknowledge this WebCGM WG response by 
replying to this mail and copying the WebCGM public mailing list, 
public-webcgm@w3.org.  Please reply before 17 August 2009, and let us know 
whether you accept the WG response or not.  If we receive no reply from you 
by August 17, then we will default your reply to "WebCGM WG response accepted."

In case you do not accept the WG response, you are requested to provide a 
specific solution for or a path to a consensus with the Working Group.

If such a consensus cannot be achieved, you will be given the opportunity 
to raise a formal objection which will then be reviewed by the Director 
during the transition of this document to the next stage in the W3C 
Recommendation Track.

Best regards,

On behalf of the WebCGM Working Group,
Lofton Henderson, WebCGM WG Chair.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webcgm/2009Jun/0002.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-webcgm21-20090604/
_____________________________________________________________
* Comment Sent: Sat, 20 Jun 2009
* Archived:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webcgm/2009Jun/0002.html
The WebCGM WG has the following responses to your comment:
----------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY of your first comment:
1 == moving forward with XML Schema or Relax NG ==
Sticking to DTD to define a XML dialect is neither sufficient neither a way 
to widespread the use of this XML dialect. For that, I ask the WG to 
consider providing normative XML Schema and/or Relax NG schema of the XCF 
model. It will help adoption especially because XCF uses Namespaces.

RESPONSE to your first comment:
The WebCGM Working Group (WG) agrees that WebCGM could potentially benefit 
by addition of a normative schema -- XML Schema or Relax NG. Unfortunately, 
this proposal is beyond the scope of this 2nd LCWD review, and it is deemed 
to be too late in the WebCGM 2.1 development cycle. Ideally, such a 
proposal would have been included in the WebCGM 2.1 Requirements, or before 
1st LCWD review at latest. The implementation of such a proposal would 
involve major disruption of the WebCGM 2.1 text -- removal of the DTD and 
complete rewriting of Chapter 4 (at least). Since it does not address an 
error in the specification, or a serious defect, or violation of any W3C 
requirement, the WG believes that the proposal should be postponed until a 
future WebCGM development cycle.

As an interim step, the WG thinks that a non-normative Technical Note, 
separate from the progression of 2.1 WebCGM, might be an interesting 
approach. The WG would also welcome an initial contribution, if you have 
interest in making such.


SUMMARY of your second comment:
2 == interaction between WebCGM and CSS ==
Is it possible to consider the role that could play CSS vis à vis WebCGM ?

RESPONSE to your second comment:
Potential relationships between WebCGM and CSS were studied in some detail 
[3] prior to the WebCGM 2.0 standardization. This study [3] developed a 
detailed model and showed the technical feasibility for a rich application 
of CSS-like styling to WebCGM.
[3] http://www.cgmopen.org/technical/stylable_cgm_submitted_0324.pdf

Despite the technical feasibility, the WebCGM 2.0 authors and constituents 
agreed that the the principal WebCGM use cases did not justify the cost and 
implementation effort of such a full-featured normative CSS capability in 
WebCGM. Therefore normative CSS-like style sheets were not further pursued.

Nevertheless, whenever possible, applicable features and characteristics of 
CSS were followed in the design of WebCGM 2.0, especially the new DOM-based 
Style Properties feature. For example the inheritance model of CSS was 
adapted directly into the Style Properties inheritance model (section 5.4), 
and there are a number of other examples of functionality borrowed 
more-or-less directly from CSS.
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Received on Tuesday, 28 July 2009 23:10:41 UTC