TAG issues brainstorming

TAG members: welcome.

First of all, a big thank you to everyone who allowed themselves
to be nominated for offering their time and wisdom.
To those elected, welcome, let us start.

Thanks to Ian Jacobs, TAG team contact,  for taking on 
issue and schedule tracking and some writing work for this group.

I'd like to start by a little brainstorming over issues to be
 discussed.  I suspect that this will be important but may
be frustrating in the long term, as we will unearth so much
to do that we will have no hope of covering it.

The normal brainstorming method, which seems to apply here,
is to first collect thoughts relatively randomly, and then to
look for structure, so I will resist the urge to impose my
preconceived structure at this point.

(As you probably know, the architectural issues which I have
found it personally necessary to note down over the years
are in http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues. Of these, 
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture.html
"Web Architecture from 50,000 feet" is an attempt at an
overview, which was originally requested in 1998
by the cross-working group meeting. So that is where
I would start, although it is now out of date.)
References to other architectural documents
would of course be very useful.

The  TAG members will met first (apart from on this list)
in a teleconference Ian is scheduling.  At that meeting 
I would expect us to start to lay out a framework in
which to slot these issues, so as to lay out a plan to
make the best use of our time. Before the meeting,
then,  please send your thoughts on the issues we should address
to this list.

I have noticed that there are two very connected ways in
which the word architecture comes to be used: one
is as the set of global invariants which ensure the operational
properties of the system; the other is of a module diagram
of the technologies or work items.  The connection is that 
the architectural invariants create interfaces which make the
modularity possible.  But if there is a choice between defining
invariants and defining module structure, I thing our job is
more of the former.

I would like to focus here on the fundamental issues, the ones
which will be described in some core documents which
the TAG will produce.  There are indeed many urgent but
less fundamental issues arising in current work in W3C
and elsewhere,  but I would like to keep those separate.

We will also have to distinguish between issues which we think
are well understood and in dire need of documentation,
from those which are not widely understood, or not widely
agreed.  I hope we find most are in the former category!


Tim

Received on Monday, 17 December 2001 16:11:35 UTC