Re: brainstorming: test cases, issues, goals, etc.

Mihai Sucan schreef:
>> 1. A continue-the-work approach within the limits of the patent policy.
>>
>> For something to be patented, it must be non-trivial, and there must not
>> be prior art, right? One could run through the WHATWG spec and look for
>> [...]
>
> Interesting idea about the patents.

Apparantly I’m seeing the software patents from a somewhat simplistic 
perspective; I hear they are even more complex than that, which is all 
the more reason to be scared of them if you ask me :).

> The second approach, while it's good by itself, would probably take 
> too long to do.

Well, to me, having say a list of 30~50 individual items would seem like 
it would actually be fairly easy to work with, from an organisational 
perspective. You could just take them on one by one, because of their 
advanced nature most won’t get too much comments. E.g. the HTML parsing 
rules don’t leave much to complain about I’d say, and they’re a big 
chunk of the spec.

As opposed to having to review one huge spec at once, it seems like it 
would be easier to retain the overview (a bug tracker of some kind would 
help). And they would exist on the same level with new proposals, which 
I think is a plus.

To put it in different terms, I suppose you could view it as 
‘modularisation’ :).

> It all really depends on what the working group chairs want.

We are asked to brainstorm, so brainstorming I do :). From what I see, 
the chair(s) themselves also don’t really have a real idea yet either on 
how to approach this exactly.

But anyway, I was just suggesting possible approaches, and hope for 
others to put in some ideas too. Putting things in black/white in terms 
of either take over the WHATWG work entirely or starting from scratch 
isn’t constructive or realistic. Neither scenario seems possible to me, 
starting with the same spec not because of patent issues, and starting 
entirely from scratch not because it would never reach its milestones in 
time and disregard a huge amount of work already done.

> I believe the "beauty" of Web Forms 2 is precisely being easy, and 
> approachable by developers. The FTF has to do something around the 
> same idea. WF2 is a very welcome improvement. 

Yes. But I’m sure there’s room for improvement, and considering how to 
better synchronise it with XForms and XForms concepts, while still 
retaining the simplicity.

Just from the top of my head, e.g. a declarative way to show error 
messages in arbitrary locations, instead of having to use Javascript. Or 
to show them in two locations, both at the invalid controls and in a 
summary at the bottom close to the submit button, with links to the 
invalid controls. Backbase has customers who want that.

Also, Web Forms 2.0 has no ‘valid’ event counterpart of the ‘invalid’ 
event, and the ‘invalid’ event itself is underspecified.

Stuff like that.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.