Re: XForms CR - 3.3.2 "one and the same"?

Schailesh, Mark, Andrew, all,

yes - good observations. There is no "problem" here - but
we need experience and best practices - I will take the
time and energy to expand:

There is a continuum in approaching user interface, where
one end of the spectrum is that the data and the UI are the
same, and the other end that the two are completely different.

I'm stressing the term continuum because there are many
shades of grey between those two extremes - complete
WYSIWYG and the UI is completely independent from the
underlying data structure.

Catering just for one end of the spectrum, the WYSIWYG
case, would have been way to simply. For example, we could
have just added the "editable" property to CSS, and assume
that a XML+CSS user agent now renders everything as
editable text boxes, submit the entire (changed) XML document
on submission, call it XForms and be done.

So we did not do that because it is an over-simplification, and
even though end-users love WYSIWYG, it just too short-sighted
and questions arise quickly: "how do I edit attributes?" - "where
do I put my logic?".

With XForms 1.0, we focussed on the harder problem of
allowing developers to define their one balance between UI and
data in the continuum. This was the right decision and a much more
complex task to solve.

What we are doing now is looking back at this edge case, or
symmetry case, how I call it, in the continuum, where UI and data
are in fact the same.

A valid XForms 1.0 may point to itself as its instance. And how
the processing is defined now, the UI would be copy/clone of the
instance data. So it can be done now. We're just investigating this
a little more and welcome feedback on this particular issue,
however we don't have to "fix" anything.

- Sebastian


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Birbeck" <Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net>
To: "'Karandikar, Shailesh'" <Shailesh.Karandikar@dendrite.com>
Cc: <www-forms@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 6:38 PM
Subject: RE: XForms CR - 3.3.2 "one and the same"?


>
> > One concern with making the instance point directly to the current
> > document,
> > rather than a seperate instance/clone of the same one is that the
> > processor
> > might change portions of the document for various reasons  (E.g.
attaching
> > additional attributes to form controls, decorating instance data nodes,
> > etc.) for the ease of processing. All such changes would be 'exposed'
> > unintentionally. Also Some processors make structural changes to the
> > document (E.g. inserting new bind elements).
>
> Hence the need for a publicly defined interface - my argument for a DOM
> spec. You can do what you want internally, but you have to honour the
public
> declarations.
>
> Mark
>
>
> [CARMEN]
http://webaccess.mozquito.com:8080/mail/schnitz/inbox/880970921203547880.xml

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2002 14:16:40 UTC