Re: review of REX, Remote Events for XML

On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 16:25 -0500, Grosso, Paul wrote:
> We have been asked to review
>  Remote Events for XML (REX) 1.0
> published at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-rex-20060202/
> though the latest member-only version is at
> http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Group/repository/spec/REX/publish/rex.xhtml

> Does anyone volunteer to review this?

Here is a review, in priority order:


1- The attribute ns is yet another namespace resolution mechanism. Why
don't they use xmlns and qnames? Are they trying to avoid the
declaration of the http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events namespace?
[[
The 'ns' attribute defines the namespace that applies to DOM event
names within the scope of the element on which it occurs. For any
given DOM event name, if there is no 'ns' attribute on any of its
ancestor elements, that event name's IRI component is
http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events. Otherwise, it will have the
namespace component corresponding to the first 'ns' attribute found on
its ancestor elements in reverse document order. The content of the
'ns' attribute is either an IRI or the empty string. If the empty
string then event names in its applicable scope will have no namespace
IRI component.
]]
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Group/repository/spec/REX/publish/rex.xhtml#attr-ns

2. An event can have a timeStamp attribute, which "contains an integer
in milliseconds relative to the epoch (defined to be 00:00:00 UTC 1st
January 1970) at which the event is to be dispatched.". But the
processing model "recommends that REX messages be processed in a
streaming fashion" and doesn't take the timestamp information into
account ("Implementations SHOULD dispatch events encoded in REX messages
as soon as they have finished parsing the corresponding <event>
element.").

3- They are using a pseudo syntax to define their content model, which I
am not fond of. Should we recommend to them a better human readable?  [[
<define name='rex'>
  <element name='rex'>
    <optional>
      <attribute name='version'>
        <value>1.0</value>
      </attribute>
    </optional>
    <ref name='ns'/>
    <oneOrMore>
      <ref name='event'/>
    </oneOrMore>
  </element>
</define>
]]
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Group/repository/spec/REX/publish/rex.xhtml#elem-rex

The syntax used in the WSDL is a lot more readable to my taste:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-wsdl20-20060106/#Interface_XMLRep

Regards,

Philippe