RE: The message action is for messages, not arbitrary dialogs

Well, we're kind of going around in circles here.  Prior emails have 
already indicate that you cannot add *anything you like* to UI.Inline. 
That's not what it says.

Adding *anything we like* to message means we can add *anything we like* 
to label as well.  So, you can put a whole subform in a label?!?  As with 
message, that is not the intent of label at all.  I don't think it is the 
intent of help, hint and alert either, but bending label to be a whole 
subform seems to illustrate the point particularly well due to the 
breakdown of accessibility that ensues.

>From that vantage point, it should be clear that the purpose in allowing 
elements of the host language in message, label, help, hint and alert is 
to make their "messages" display in a more friendly manner.

This is not to say that the mandate of some of these elements should not 
be expanded to the use cases that folks would like to solve.  But the push 
back here is that implementations which don't already use message as a 
dialog are not broken.  More careful examination would be needed to turn 
message into a dialog, including doing so in a way that does not also turn 
label into a group.  Moreover, the push back is that it might make more 
sense to leave message as a message and make a dialog construct to solve 
the dialog problem.

This also doesn't mean that those whose messages already behave like 
dialogs should just drop what they're doing.  People have to innovate and 
find out what works, and they want to keep those things working until a 
migration path can be defined, which necessitates having the language 
feature show up to migrate to.  Maybe the migration path is null, but 
maybe it isn't.

John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM: Workplace Forms Architect and Researcher
Co-Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com  http://www.ibm.com/software/

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer





"Klotz, Leigh" <Leigh.Klotz@xerox.com> 
Sent by: www-forms-request@w3.org
01/10/2007 02:40 PM

To
<mark.birbeck@x-port.net>, John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
cc
<www-forms@w3.org>, <www-forms-request@w3.org>
Subject
RE: The message action is for messages, not arbitrary dialogs







On this topic, I recall that this was an explicit compromise decision
between the 2-line LCD phone and the desktop HTML browser.

 > So there is nothing in the spec that says you can add any XForms
element other than
 > output into the content of message.
 Yes there is...I can add anything I like to UI.Inline. (See above.)