label in message

Dear Forms Working Group,

In the case of modal and modeless message actions, there has been no 
standardized way to specify the caption bar content.

In XForms 1.2, shouldn't we just add the label element as a potential 
child element of the message action?

This would give us the freedom to specify exact text or to obtain the text 
from the instance data.  Granted someone *could* try to put very 
elaborated content, including images, into the caption bar, but we could 
make it clear that simple char data is required to implement and more 
elaborated content is optional.

In the ephemeral message case, the label content could simply be prepended 
to the other content.

Finally, this might be seen as the "long hand" of having a simple label 
attribute for elements like message, as well as UI controls.  Currently, 
"XForms for HTML" proposes such an attribute for form controls, but it 
seems natural to extend the attribute to anything that allows the label 
element as a child.

Thanks for considering this.

John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

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