Re: Draft minutes for 2008-10-15 F2F Virtual Day, Second Half

Hi everyone,

On 10/15/08, Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. <Leigh.Klotz@xerox.com> wrote:
> Draft minutes for  2008-10-15 F2F Virtual Day, Second Half.
> First half of day is in IRC minutes, whose URL is included in this document.

Wow...very impressive minutes, Leigh.

And it sounds like it was an interesting day.

One minor comment on the XPath function discussion; the evaluation
context for XPath 2.0 includes a default function namespace, which is
applied to functions that do not have a prefix. If we define this to
be the XForms namespace, then by default authors can use XForms
functions unprefixed. We should also provide a way for the author to
override this.

So, when defining the functions themselves in a specification, all
that would need to happen is to ensure that they are defined *with*
prefixes. It doesn't matter whether they are defined across one or ten
specifications, as long as the prefix is always the same, they would
be available to an XForms author for use *unprefixed*. In other words,
we don't need to say anything about 'importing modules', etc., since
that is all part of XPath.

For example, in some spec we might say that there is a new function, like this:

  xf:new-func($a as xs:integer, $b as xs:boolean) as xs:integer

This indicates that there is a function 'new-func', and that it is
identified by the URI:

  <http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms#new-func>

That gives us a unique identifier for our function, and regardless of
the context it is used in, we will always know what function we are
talking about.

How that function is coded up in mark-up will depend on the in-scope
default function namespace at the time the function is called. In an
XForms document with the 'default default', so to speak, an author can
use the function like this:

  @value="a + new-func( b )"

I.e., they would not need to use the explicit prefix. Of course, an
author could do so if they wanted to, like this:

  @value="a + xf:new-func( b )"

Regards,

Mark

-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
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Received on Thursday, 16 October 2008 11:06:31 UTC