ACCESS comments for http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xforms-20020118

Dear Editors:

 Attached pleaase find the general comment on XForms 1.0 WD dated January 18, 2002.
 Best Regards,

 Toshihiko Yamakami, R&D, ACCESS
 yam@access.co.jp

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Comments for Last Call WD of XForms(http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xforms-20020118) From ACCESS 020221
This is a general comment on XForms WD 18 January 2002 (Last Call) from ACCESS.
We witness the emergence of browser-enabled mobile handsets all over the world[1]. After three years from launch, there are more than 50 million browser-enabled mobile handsets Internet users in Japan. No one denies that this trend of Internet on the palm will be spread all over the world in a very near future.
We also witness the significant amount of standardization and industrial consortium work on making specifications for mobile handsets and Internationalization.
We think it is a time to reconsider the standards specification format in order to make the various kinds of works for compact profiles and international compact profile.
For this purpose, every drafting team for recommendations should take into account that a draft can be composed as three parts: language independent core part, language independent extension part, and language dependent part. It could be accomplished by some framework, modular structure, guidelines, or informal notes.
Reading the XForms 1.0 draft, it seems like that "D input Modes" attribute heavily depends on the input target language (here, language means English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and such category of human communication symbol systems).
Also the requirements of XForms like "strong typing" and "XML submission" are useful in browser-embedded mobile phone environment. It would be desirable which part of the draft is mandatory when these minimum requirements are met.
We agree that the many of the XForms features depends on the XML features like namespaces and such high level features are not available on the most mobile handsets. This means it is very difficult to predict that the how people can make a compact profile for XForms.
In any case, compact profiles and internationalization will take place sooner or later to cope with the real world problems. We hope that the systematic approach to the standards could remove many of the common pains on the standardization related activities on this planet.

Reference:
 [1]“Beyond the Post-PC Internet” Vinton Cerf, CACM, Vol.44, No. 9, Sep 2001, pp. 34-37　in the Special issue “The Invisible Internet”.

Received on Friday, 22 February 2002 06:53:37 UTC