Re: New HTML/XML Task Force Report

Hi Norm,

On Jan 12, 2012, at 18:32 , Norman Walsh wrote:
> I have incorporated those editorial changes that I felt would be
> uncontroversial:
> 
>  http://www.w3.org/2010/html-xml/snapshot/report-2012-01-12.html

The changes look good to me.

> 1. The TAG would like more references: pointers to relevant work,
> areas where an interested reader could get more information about the
> topics discussed. I don't feel like I've been able to address this
> request adequately. If you are aware of documents that would fullfill
> that need, please send them to me.

Yes, that request has come up before. We can get into details once the minutes are public, but at least for some aspects I'm afraid that there's very little existing reference outside the brains of the people who've been involved in the work. This could mean that there could be a need to actually write some of those things down (but not in this document).

> 3. The principle substantive comments from the TAG (which I assume
> will be refleced in the minutes when they're made public) were about
> polyglot markup. I think some good points were made about the
> applicability of polyglot in closed environments where documents are
> being produced for publication but also for other (internal) uses. In
> particular, it was observed that polyglot documents could be
> transmitted with EXI or signed digitally with XML Signature. The
> ability to publish exactly the same documents on the web as can be
> used with those technologies is, in my opinion, worth calling out.

IMHO that's the primary (perhaps even only) value of polyglot. If you're in a controlled environment and know what you're doing it allows you to use XML tools and publish on the Web at the same time. I'm not sure that's all that contentious though — objections to the value of polyglot are usually more focused on the fact that it's not a general solution since there are some documents that it can't capture.

Note that EXI isn't necessarily a good example here since despite its name it can actually encode anything that can build a tree (I'd have to freshen up on the details, but in fact I think it can even capture the sort of non-tree constructs that are allowed by the XQuery DM). In fact it's possible that the only parts of the XML toolset that would be problematic to adapt to an HTML syntax are the ones that rely on XML C15N (i.e. Signature and Encryption). For all of the accepted doxa that XML is defined purely as a wire format devoid of data model I find it quite striking that there's remarkably little in the stack that isn't built at a higher level of abstraction.

> 4. Participation in the Task Force is entirely voluntary, of course,
> and I can't make commitments on your behalf. I have agreed that I will
> continue as chair and editor through at least one publish
> publicly/receive comments/revise/republish cycle. I hope that you're
> willing and able to continue to participate as well.

I'll stick around!

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Friday, 13 January 2012 11:48:34 UTC