Meeting Summary - 15 October 2007

[Meeting Summary - 15 Oct 2007] Vocabulary resolutions, Korea F2F.

[Vocab] This week's conference call was energetic and productive. The main topic on the agenda was to make decisions on the many proposed core vocabulary properties, taking into account the many responses and other comments received to date. Over the past week, the group had been voting to identify those properties that were core, not core and deserving of further debate. It was assumed that those who had engaged in the voting had strong opinions to express.

The first property discussed related to H.264 (Baseline Profile Level 1.0). This deals with streaming video rates. It was felt that this property was outside of the scope of a core vocabulary that was focussed only on the essential properties for adapting Web content for mobile delivery contexts. The group intends to respond to the proposal by indicating how domain specific, custom and advanced vocabularies can be created; and the role of the UWA ontology in this regard. It was resolved that H.264 is not part of the core vocabulary.

The next property was the DOM Level of the browser. It was felt that the DOM Level did not have a strong bearing on the adaptation of content. Knowing the DOM Level might be useful in adapting scripts that access the DOM. In the same vein, the group considered the XMLHTTPRequest support of the browser, and again this was felt to be a script-oriented property. Both of these properties would be considered core to an adaptation process for mobile Ajax, but not for a simple adaptation process that is dealing with simple Web content. It was decided that these properties would be communicated to the OpenAjax Alliance, with a view to encouraging them to create a vocabulary for adaptation of Ajax, following the example of DDWG.

Support for ECMAScript (or JavaScript) was also discussed. It was felt that knowing that a browser supports scripting is beneficial for more than just Ajax applications. It was therefore resolved that this property should be in the core vocabulary, but there would still need to be further discussion on whether it should represent ECMAScript and/or JavaScript.

The proposed property of Characters Per Line was debated. It was suggested that this property would be useful for pagination. However, it was also seen as a throwback to the old days of WML content, where fonts were very simple and the character density was an important property. Today, with variable fonts and more complex layouts, character density is less precise. In the absence of exact font information, and approximation based on screen resolution would probably suffice. To do things like sophisticated line wrapping, you would need much more detailed information about the fonts, which the group agreed would go far beyond a simple adaptation. For simple adaptation, the screen width would be a sufficient means to approximate the character density and thus the Characters Per Line property was resolved to be non-core.

It was pointed out that no matter what the DDWG decides will be in the core, there will be people who will say some properties are missing. The best that the group can achieve is a basic vocabulary that will support simple content adaptation, and be sufficient to demonstrate the operation of the DDR API. This needs to be explained in the Vocabulary document.

The group then turned its focus on some properties that all agreed were core: the dimensions of the screen. The width and height were seen by everyone as essential for content adaptation. While previous proposed properties were rejected from the core, these two properties were immediately resolved to be core properties.

With this practice on the decision process, the group agreed to take the discussion to the electronic forum, where the remaining candidate properties would be debated, and some further resolutions taken. This debate, and the conclusions, would be visible on the public mailing list and the wiki.

[Korea] Finally the group acknowledged an invitation to hold a face-to-face meeting in Korea in 2008. The group will send a formal response after polling the members.

Attendees:
Matt, Andrea, Pontus, José, Jo, Rotan, Martin, Dimitar, Kevin, Jongpil, Bryan, Nacho

Received on Thursday, 18 October 2007 15:54:57 UTC