WADL evolution and changes to Unicorn

Hello,

At the WWW conference a couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to attend  
a presentation of WADL (which Unicorn uses) by its creator.

Worthy of note was, he showed the latest version of WADL, which now  
(well, since Nov 2006 apparently) includes a <doc> child to any  
element. This is particularly interesting for us since it makes the  
use of two different files to describe the observers (the contract)  
unnecessary.

https://wadl.dev.java.net/
200611 spec at https://wadl.dev.java.net/wadl20061109.pdf

Other changes include the fact that one cannot directly embed XML  
schemas in the wadl file, instead you point to them.

I looked at the latest spec, and played with a nifty interface called  
REST describe, which lets its user build a wadl file fairly easily.
http://tomayac.de/rest-describe/latest/RestDescribe.html
Attached are the updated WADL files for the CSS validator and AppC  
Checker. They could probably be optimized further, and I am not  
entirely sure about the xs types, but looks OK otherwise.

Something interesting about WASL is that there are a few projects to  
take WADL and either make it into human-readable documentation (e.g  
this XSLT: http://www.mnot.net/webdesc/ ) but also projects to have  
code built automatically from the wadl file. This could be  
interesting for us if, for example, we wanted to automatically build  
code to handle various response formats without imposing ours. Worth  
thinking about, I guess.

In the meantime, I plan to:
* update the org.w3c.unicorn.contract code ( http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/ 
2006/unicorn/org/w3c/unicorn/contract/ ) to not need to parse an RDF  
file any longer,
* Simplify the unicorn contract spec ( http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/ 
Unicorn/contract/ ) - basically : "just use WADL to describe a  
request to your observer".

-- 
olivier