- From: Jon Bosak <bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 11:48:25 -0800
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@www10.w3.org
- CC: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
[David Durand:] | If the ERB propagates it working decisions in the form of a | complete preliminary proposal before we have a directed | design-decision by design-decision discussion, I predict that the | final result will be strongly determined by the initial proposal. This | may be good or bad, but it is likely to happen. Let's review. On December 19, Tim Bray proposed a process for defining the goals and principles for Phase II of this activity. He started it off with a straw proposal for a list of design goals entitled Minimum Progress Required to Declare Victory. I reproduce that message at the end of this post for those who may have forgotten it. He attempted to define a process for refining his proposal as follows: | Sensible reactions to this proposal include: | - suggestions that we add facility X, because it's easy and useful | - suggestions that we add facility X whether it's easy or not because | it's such a basic need that we're wasting our time if we leave it out | - suggestions that we remove facility X, because it'll get us in trouble | - suggestions for compliance, at some level, with some existing standard | - meta-suggestions for good ways to structure this discussion | - comprehensive yet compact fully thought out proposals for a hyperlinking | facility, supported by multiple public-domain reference implementations Soon after he had made this proposal, Tim attempted to get participants to respond to specific points in a way that would create an organized list of design principles: | Martin, your contribution addresses two points in the MPRDV note, | which could either be identified by number (3.2sub2, 3.3) or name | (addressing un-ID'd objects, link-end to address sets.) To achieve | some sort of order in this discussion, it would help if people would | use the "Subject:" line to support discussion threads at a level | somewhat narrower than "Hyperlinks". This attempt to set up a discussion of goals in advance of specific proposals has largely been ignored by everyone, including those who are now complaining about a lack of process. After letting the conversation free-wheel for a while (a completely conscious decision for which I take full responsibility), Tim, concluding (I believe) that his original proposal would stand as our guide, moved the discussion forward by suggesting a concrete proposal in a message of December 29: | All this discussion has been quite educational, but the proportion of | it that I can relate to the problems that I as co-editor will soon be | facing is kind of low. | | I think it's time for a strawman. [...] Eliot responded to this a few days later with a very useful HyTime-based "house of sticks", and that's why we are now talking in terms of proposals. The ERB feels that we are now ready to look at an actual straw proposal, and the co-editors of the link draft are preparing one even as we speak. You should have their initial attempt before you within the next day or so. I'm sorry if anyone feels that there hasn't been enough time spent on a discussion of goals before considering specific proposals, but it certainly wasn't for a lack of opportunity. Looking back over the last month of discussion, I personally am of the opinion that we couldn't have made better progress without chewing on various aspects of the problem in the way that we have done, and I think that we are as ready as we will ever be to move forward within the organization of a specific plan. I don't know exactly what the draft co-editors will be presenting, but I am confident that it will take into account all the many insightful contributions made to this list (I would like to recognize Dave's work in particular, without which we could not have come as far as we have in understanding the issues) and that it will be the best starting point that we could hope for at this stage. Jon ######################################################################## Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 20:19:45 -0800 To: w3c-sgml-wg@www10.w3.org From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> Subject: Hyperlinks: MPRDV In the meeting of Dec. 18, the ERB discussed how we might start moving forward on hyperlinking. Attempts to proceed as we did with the base XML language, i.e. agree on a statement of principles and start subsetting an existing standard, seem fraught with difficulty; in particular it seems very difficult to separate the meta-discussion of design goals from the discussion of implementation details and standards compliance. To help get things going, and after running this idea past the ERB, I am introducing a proposal entitled Minimum Progress Required to Declare Victory. The idea is to continue running with the XML premise; that you can do a lot with a little. In particular, we should be able to offer the Web community something subtantially better than they're used to without having to go very far. It should be borne in mind that to do a good job on specifying even a little, you have to fight through some surprisingly hairy problems (as witness our recent experience on this list). This is an attempt to spot the low-hanging fruit in the hyperlinking jungle. Sensible reactions to this proposal include: - suggestions that we add facility X, because it's easy and useful - suggestions that we add facility X whether it's easy or not because it's such a basic need that we're wasting our time if we leave it out - suggestions that we remove facility X, because it'll get us in trouble - suggestions for compliance, at some level, with some existing standard - meta-suggestions for good ways to structure this discussion - comprehensive yet compact fully thought out proposals for a hyperlinking facility, supported by multiple public-domain reference implementations This will presumably launch us on a fairly free-form discussion ranging from philosophy through implementation, which is no bad thing at this stage. At some point we will have to impose structure on the discussion and generate a draft and so on; this point will doubtless arrive before many of us are comfortable that we're ready. Speaking unofficially, but I think on behalf of the ERB, it seems that the breakneck pace at which we plowed through XML was on balance a good thing, and we'll try to stick with that. Having said all this, I should emphasize that while the ERB gave me the OK to post this and get things going, it is *not* a position of the ERB, and no hint should be taken that we are leaning in this direction or any other. Once again, it will be helpful if those responding use subject lines to help sort out threads. I'll place an HTML version of this at http://www.textuality.com/sgml-erb/mprdv.html ================================================================= Minimum Progress Required to Declare Victory 1. Background The Web is the largest working hypermedia instance. It supports one widely-used form of hyperlink, the <A> or Anchor element. These links are unidirectional and [this is a basic design principle of the web] specify basically nothing about their target except its location. The links carry no typing or role information, beyond the unconstrained text that may be found between the <A> and </A> tags. HTML offers another hyperlink facility, the LINK header element, but it is not widely used. Web links support a variety of behaviors, governed by the interaction of the "scheme" part of the URL (http:, file:, ftp:, mailto:) and the logic in the "User Agent" (typically a browser). It might be argued that there are really a smaller number of behaviors (a) retrieve and display, (b) retrieve and save, (c) send mail; but the number of behaviors exceeds one. There are a variety of other standards that support hyperlinks, of which the most visible are HyTime, part of TEI, and in the area of object naming, the IETF URN work. None of these, at this moment, has overwhelming market acceptance, or credibility at the level enjoyed by SGML. HyTime has ISO's blessing, URN has the IETF's; TEI is used to encode many billions of bytes of text. 2. Minimum Progress on Deliverables The minimal deliverable is a smallish document (smaller than the XML spec) with an independent existence and name - for example, XHA for Extensible Hyperlink Architecture. The hyperlinking mechanisms should be applicable to XML of course, but also to SGML and (to the extent possible) to HTML. XHA should have no dependency on XML. However, we may choose to build special machinery into XML (reserved elements/attributes/archforms) to optimize support for XHA. 3. Minimum Progress on Hyperlink Enhancement The minimum set of hyperlink constructs should: 3.1 subsume the existing WWW Anchor semantics in a smooth and natural way. 3.2 provide a hyperlink mechanism with richness similar to that of the HyTime "ilink" construct. This means that the link - has a type, - has multiple ends, each of which has a role, and - may be located away from any of its ends, thus supporting links into read-only material. 3.3 support addressing at least by URL and ID attribute, alone or in combination. 4. Minimum Progress on Behavior The minimum set of behavior machinery should provide: 4.1 mechanisms for users to identify and describe behaviors associated with hyperlinks. 4.2 predefined behaviors equivalent to those already in wide use on the Net. 5. Minimum Progress on Link Roles The minimum set of link role machinery should provide: 5.1 mechanisms for users to identify and describe roles for link-ends. 5.2 predefined link roles equivalent to those already in wide use on the Internet Cheers, Tim Bray tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167
Received on Tuesday, 21 January 1997 14:49:19 UTC