TAG directions

1.   Customers

I wonder if we are clear (i.e. I am not clear) who our customers are. That is, whose needs are we trying to meet? Candidates include punters, developers (software or webpage), infrastructure providers, website owners/operators, web software companies.

2.   Fundamentals

What are some things that some/many of our 'customers' depend on from the Web, that we haven't addressed yet/well/much? (c.f. 'ROAM')

• Identity
• Context (cookies, IP address, identity (see above))
• Search engines
• Partially-/Un- connected access (proxies, catalogues, push, etc.)

3.   Personal interests

Some things I'm interested in, which may or may not really be TAG issues:

• Naming on the web - Are we sufficiently grounded in the web people actually use and experience, as opposed to an idealisation we wish were the case?
  • httpRange-14
  • secondary resources
  • abstraction
  • 'information resources' vs. the rest
• Languages vs. namespaces
  • Naming languages
  • Describing languages and namespaces and their relationships (includes versioning and evolution)
• XML Processing
  • Pipelines
  • 'Evaluable' documents
• The entity problem (The future of XML general entities)
  • Only in DTDs
  • Liable to abuse (million laughs)
  • A crutch or a fundamental architectural component?