W3C Forms teleconference December 5, 2007

* Present

Charlie Wiecha, IBM
Erik Bruchez, Orbeon
John Boyer, IBM (chair)
Leigh Klotz, Xerox (minutes)
Nick van den Bleeken, Inventive Designers
Rafael Benito, SATEC
Keith Wells, IBM
Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, Dreamlabs

* Agenda

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2007Dec/0003.html

* Previous minutes

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2007Nov/0095.html IRC supplement: http://www.w3.org/2007/11/28-forms-minutes.html

* XML Conference

John Boyer: We had a full to over-capacity crowd at the conference. I believe the room had about 20 people sitting on floors, not bad for a 7:30-9:30PM slot. The chair of the conference said there wasn't even standing room. I got feedback as did Dave Megginson that many people felt it was the best thing they'd seen at the conference. They liked the format of two-hour focused session with the 15-minute talks. They were hit with the idea that XForms gives you a bit of a thicker client mentality, combined with Web 2.0 technologies pushing the server tier more towards it. One of the highlights was Erik Bruchez's presentation, where XForms cut out the entire middle tier. Of course, blogs, wikis, and social collaboration software.
Leigh Klotz: We're shipping that.
John Boyer: Yes, I mentioned that from Xerox.
John Boyer: I got to talk to Michael Sperberg-McQueen, who was interested in editing HTML in a textarea and see a display of the HTML. I think we have that with XForms 1.1 mediatype on output.
Leigh Klotz: We don't have it on input.
John Boyer: Yes, I put that in the future features triage I've done. Push the underlying content as XHTML markup or at a minimum as an encoded string so we can get the content back to the output.

John Boyer: The keynote speech was by Elliotte Rusty Harold. The demos leading off to it came off well. Elliotte's main point was XForms was a "Cambridge" technology, and what's succeeding are "New Jersey" technologies. His three following points

Leigh Klotz: [irc] The name comes from Dick Gabriel's paper; here's a link http://naggum.no/worse-is-better.html

John Boyer: The first app was word processing but the first "killer app" was a spreadsheet, which doesn't do anything. So I pitched the idea that XForms is the killer app because of what it does to middle tier coding. So that can coalesce the first two points.
Charlie Wiecha: So what can we do in the network other than transforming to Tag Soup and JavaScript?
John Boyer: ...

John Boyer: On the browser side, ...
Leigh Klotz: And Google is using Webkit (KHTML, Konqueror) in their mobile system.
Charlie Wiecha: Android.
John Boyer: Then on browser vendors, the web is defined by more than what the browser vendors produce. As we see from Yahoo and Google toolkits the web is bigger.
John Boyer: And there's some discussion of adding XForms to GWT by Jerome van Rotterdam.
Charlie Wiecha: That's a bit of a hack.

John Boyer: Can we make a record of what we did? Charlie, your version is was somewhat dynamic.
Charlie Wiecha: There's a slide deck. You can edit your profile and there is a place to upload.

* Future Teleconferences

John Boyer: Is everybody here two weeks from now, the 19th? I propose we have a three-week break starting then.
Charlie Wiecha: Steven is on vacation to the end of the year.
John Boyer: Perhaps we should only go for a two-week break.
Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer: I'll be back on January 19, but I can make December 19.
Nick van: We probably don't have a call on January 2.
John Boyer: So three weeks hiatus, starting on December 26th. So no calls December 26, January 2, and January 9.
Charlie Wiecha: We can meet the 9th.
Nick van: Yes.
Keith Wells: Yes.
John Boyer: OK, but that's the first of the 90-minute calls. We can still get Steven to make the changes. So, two weeks with some absences and we cancel December 26 and January 2.

Resolution 2007-12-5.1: We take a two week teleconference break and we cancel December 26 and January 2. January 9th is the first of the 90-minute calls, with some absences.

* Future F2F Meetings

John Boyer: What do you think about having our first virtual day on the day before everybody flies out.
Erik Bruchez: February 1, fine for me.
Charlie Wiecha: That works.
John Boyer: We could meet by phone and decide timezone and work out the details. So it sounds like we're amenable.

* Forms Monthly.

Leigh Klotz: I forgot. I will write about xforms-1.1.
John Boyer: And I have the RSS feeds on our public site, so when the report goes to www-forms, provide the RSS feeds for public-forms. The exact feed links are on the site already. I noticed that the feed links for www-forms and www-forms-editor are incorrect so I replaced them with feeds that I have verified actually work.
Leigh Klotz: They are hosted by W3C?
John Boyer: Yes.

* Triage of future features

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/wiki/XForms_Future_Features

Leigh Klotz: Why is dialogs on 2.0? What process did you use to put things on 2.0 instead of 1.2?
John Boyer: It's just an initial triage. I knew someone would find that surprising.
Leigh Klotz: How are we going to validate the 1.2/2.0 split?
Charlie Wiecha: I thought 1.2 was mostly simplification. I'm surprised to see stuff other than 20 there.
John Boyer: I knew someone would find that surprising as well. So this is mostly a list of reasonable things that had the door closed out of 1.1. So for example, model-driven switch with switch. Then look at #2, multi-case switch; it could be 2.0.

Nick van: If we do this triage, will the outcome be a requirements document? If so, will we be required to do them all? Can we drop some once we do the requirements document?
John Boyer: I know we did a number of versions. We resolved we had completed 1.1 requirements. These others seem more like point features.
Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer: I'd suggest not doing a 1.2 or 2.0 features list. I'd recommend just a list of the features as XForms 1 .2 WD, all on one document, and let it develop from there, rather than splitting it out. I don't think the modularization is a good approach. It sounds great but you lose a lot of energy in small documents on different timelines.
John Boyer: I've more or less done that, except there is one division. Consolidated Recalculate and Revalidate is bigger than a sum-product function. We can move stuff out of the 1.2 list if they're problematic.
Charlie Wiecha: That doesn't mean we can't still use that 1.2 document in a modular way.
John Boyer: Yes, submission is now self-contained in chapter 11.
Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer: I wouldn't put multiple specs through the W3C process.
John Boyer: I would agree on throughput. How much effort could we put into an instance-only module document which is really just a chapter?
Charlie Wiecha: We could write it as an almost standalone.
John Boyer: We're closer on submission. There's a tight coupling of instance and model, which seems to be needed in order to get the ease-of-authoring thing off the ground. So we'll probably stick with one document but try to get them more separate.
Charlie Wiecha: New types of instances, such as JSON.
John Boyer: Over time. It would be nice to say that we have a bucket of data called and "instance," maybe not called instance, and couple that with a referencing scheme. I don't know how far down that path we want to go in 1.2 vs 2.0.
Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer: I also tried to express that the best thing to get public involvement would be one spec.
John Boyer: Or two specs now.
Nick van: Or a requirements document, a draft version of both requirements documents.
Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer: It's more pain to have a real requirements document; I was editor of the XForms 1.0 requirements document.
John Boyer: We have been able to use the requirements document to finish last call for our recommendations as we can point to it when we get new requests.

John Boyer: Back Leigh's original question on dialog.
Leigh Klotz: Mine was about the 1.2/2.0 process, not dialog, which was a test case.
John Boyer: My question was do I have a clear and present idea of how to do it right now without shifting other features. So I wasn't clear on dialog. If someone has a proposal, like a tree control.
Charlie Wiecha: Try to New Jersify this. We're still in spec-elegance mode. I can relate to a business driver for #20. I don't have a sense for what the rest of the stuff is about in the marketplace. So, as Leigh was saying, why are we doing this 1.2? What's the higher-level purpose.
John Boyer: I can get a sub-triage going of ease-of-authoring. Like #3 if you hit enter.
Charlie Wiecha: Some of these are about business priorities such as granularity, ease-of-use, etc.
John Boyer: We need to get the discussion going.
Nick van: Leigh started last week, and I edited many of these on the wiki.
John Boyer: Due to the craziness of the network, they may have been deleted due to network problems. The wiki software crashed on the w3c site and some stuff may be missing. I don't have any network right now.

John Boyer: The direction we need to take on the list is for each person to think about how to elaborate bottom-up on these lists and express the business-case drivers for requirements to help us decide what really should do.

* IRC Minutes

http://www.w3.org/2007/12/05-forms-minutes.html

* Meeting Ends