Meeting summary - 21 Jan 2008

[Meeting summary - 21 Jan 2008] Scripting as a vocabulary entry, F2F agenda. 

[Scripting] It has been proposed that the Core Vocabulary should include a property representing information about the client's support for scripting. It is unclear what is meant by "supports script", since it is known that few if any devices support 100% the official scripting specifications. Therefore a Boolean property would be of little value as it would generally be False. Alternatively, the group has already decided that regarding image support it would be sufficient to record what the manufacturers claim is supported, rather than what has been verified, as the existence of a claim is easier to test. Finally, it was also suggested that one could identify a common code library (such as the recent OpenAjax Hub or some WURFL accessors as used in MyMobileWeb), and test the client to see if it will support these scripts. This would provide a meaningful Boolean interpretation for "supports script".

It was also noted that knowing about scripting support would not be sufficient for even basic Ajax applications, which would need to know about the DOM support and possibly the specific mechanism for asynchronous callback. For detailed Ajax use cases, it was suggested that a domain-specific vocabulary would be needed and that perhaps the OpenAjax community could devise one.

Scripts can be considered as an external/embeddable resource, just like stylesheets, images, audio and so on. It was proposed that perhaps the vocabulary should simply have a single property that enumerated all embeddable resource types, rather than have separate properties for each category. This would be more extensible than a categorised approach, and would be better able to handle resource types that might belong to multiple categories or to new/unanticipated categories. Most of the participants who expressed an opinion on this felt that the categorised approach better suited the expectations of developers. It is also possible for the same value to be in more than one category, such as GIF89a which could be a 2D image format and (in some interpretations) a video format. It was suggested that programmable formats (like scripts) should not be considered in the same category as passive data such as images. However, SVG was held up as a counter example, which can be considered as a representation of an image but is also a programmable format.

The group discussed the two views (to use categories for properties or just use a single property to enumerate all embeddable formats) in detail, but did not reach a conclusion. This issue will be discussed during the week and at the next call.

Regarding the value representing support for script, the importance of types of script and their versions were considered important. The group resolved not to use a Boolean property type. Instead there will be many values and these values will also reveal the type and version, much like is already proposed for image formats (based on MIME types).

At this point it seems certain that the Core Vocabulary will mention script support, but the manner in which this (and other embeddable resource types) is represented remains to be decided.

[F2F] The date of the Face-to-Face has been confirmed as Thursday 6and Friday 7 of March, in Seoul, Korea. Three topics are proposed for the agenda: the Core API editors' draft, the final version of the Core Vocabulary and a review of the Structures WG Note.

Attendees: Nacho, Jongpil, Pontus, Anders, Matt, José, Rotan, Jo, Bryan

Received on Friday, 25 January 2008 10:42:58 UTC