Re: Unfortunate choice of attribute name in XForms 1.1: xforms:submission/@target

Hi Erik,

It seems that the use of "target" you are describing might be a legitimate 
use of it in combination with replace="all", so it might not be in 
conflict with our current use of it for replace="instance" and 
replace="text".

The only difference might be the schema datatype for the attribute would 
change based on the value of another attribute.  Schema doesn't support 
this, but a limitation there should not get in the way of using the same 
attribute for analogous operations.  When replacing an instance, the 
target for where we put the submission result is given by an XPath into 
the data.  When doing a replace="all", it would be up for debate whether 
target should give an XPath on the document or be an IDREF.

What do you think?

John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
Senior Technical Staff Member
Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
Blog RSS feed: 
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Erik Bruchez <ebruchez@orbeon.com> 
Sent by: public-forms-request@w3.org
04/07/2008 05:23 PM

To
"Forms WG (new)" <public-forms@w3.org>
cc

Subject
Unfortunate choice of attribute name in XForms 1.1: 
xforms:submission/@target







All,

It just occurred to me that the XForms 1.1 xforms:submission/@target 
attribute [1] is badly chosen.

The reason is that a "target", in HTML speak, specifies an optional 
target window or frame. This, in particular, applies to <a> and <form> 
in HTML. [2]

In the future, we may want to officially support such a concept of 
target window or frame in XForms. Purely out of familiarity with HTML, 
the name "target" would be an obvious choice. But if we use "target" 
now to specify the destination for data replacement, we won't be able 
to use that name.

(Note that in our implementation, we already support an extension 
attribute called xxforms:target on xforms:submission and xforms:load, 
which behaves like its HTML counterpart.)

For this reason I suggest that we change the name of this attribute in 
XForms 1.1. Suggestions are welcome, but "destination" could work.

-Erik

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/#submit
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html#adef-target

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