LC comment on access module usage with XForms

The Forms WG discussed the issue below at its last face to face meeting, 
and I see now that the action item to send this note to XHTML2 "fell off 
the side of my desk" so to speak.

The issue is how to handle the access element in the context of documents 
with a run-time execution model that includes some sort of dynamic content 
generation.

The main example that came to mind was the XForms repeat, which iterates 
its content once for each node of data associated with the repeat by the 
run-time execution model.

The template content may contain elements with IDs.  Such languages define 
(or should define) rules for how to handle IDREFs to repeated elements 
with IDs.  At a minimum, a note about the existence of such markup 
languages seems warranted, along with advice to suggest that IDREF 
resolution is done according to that language.

To ensure you fully consider whether you want to go with this suggestion 
please note that the IDREF resolution method in XForms has two properties 
to consider:

1) Suppose you have an access element in a document, suppose you have a 
repeat element as its following sibling, and suppose the targetid of the 
access element indicates an element within the repeat.  Since the access 
element is outside of the repeat, the XForms IDREF method would provide 
the run-time element that matched both the requested ID and the current 
index of the repeat.

2) Suppose you have an access element *inside* of a repeat whose targetid 
indicates an element within the same repeat.  The repeat will iterate the 
access element in each "repeat item".  The XForms IDREF method in this 
case would resolve to the same repeat item whether or not the repeat item 
is the one currently indexed.  Is it appropriate for the access element to 
be scoped to operating within the containing repeat item?

Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

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