]> Technical Architecture Group Update

Slides of the presentation given at WWW 2003 in Budapest.

If your browser is enabled for SVG, I advise you to view the slideset in SVG. You may want to check the SVG Implementations page for more details on players and on the latest versions. Otherwise, you can use the links to the HTML slides below, but you will loose, for example, some rescaling and animation effects. Besides, the slides look much nicer in SVG...

Table of Content:

Introducing the new TAG...

TAG has a mixture of elected and appointed members
First TAG served a mixture of 1 and 2 year terms
Elections and new appointments Jan 2003
All outgoing members were re-appointed or re-elected
- Tim Berners-Lee (W3C)
- Tim Bray (Antarctica Systems) 2004
- Dan Connolly (W3C) 2003
- Paul Cotton (Microsoft) 2004
- Roy Fielding (Day Software) 2003
- Chris Lilley (W3C) 2004
- David Orchard (BEA Systems) 2003
- Norm Walsh (Sun) 2004
- Stuart Williams (Hewlett-Packard). 2004

TAG on the Web

Issues opened in the last 6 months

xmlProfiles-29: When, whither and how to profile W3C specifications in the XML Family
binaryXML-30: Standardize a "binary XML" format?
metadataInURI-31: Should metadata (e.g., versioning information) be encoded in URIs?
xmlIDSemantics-32: How should the problem of identifying ID semantics in XML languages; be addressed in the absence of a DTD?
mixedUIXMLNamespace-33: Composability for user interface-oriented XML namespaces

... and there's more

xmlFunctions-34: XML Transformation and composability; (e.g., XSLT, XInclude, Encryption)
RDFinXHTML-35: Syntax and semantics for embedding RDF in XHTML
siteData-36: Web site metadata improving on robots.txt, w3c/p3p and favicon etc.
abstractComponentRefs-37: Definition of abstract components with namespace names and frag ids

Issues closed in last 6 months

mixedNamespaceMeaning-13: What is the meaning of a document composed of content; in mixed namespaces?
deepLinking-25: What to say in defense of principle that deep linking is not an illegal act?
xmlProfiles-29: When, whither and how to profile W3C specifications in the XML Family

Important Issues Slowing Us Down

IRIEverywhere-27

slowing down Web Arch, XML 1.1, Namespaces 1.1, other issues
- Can IRIs be referenced now?
- Relationship between IRIs and URIs?
- String comparison vs. dereferencing
Chain of dependencies:
- International Domain Names
- RFC 2396 bis (TAG active in editing)
- IRI (TAG active in discussing)
- Many W3C specs (TAG wants to see progress to Rec)

httpRange-14

Are we excluding Semantic Web, Web Services. from Arch doc
- Accepted, 25 Mar 2002
- Discussed, every opportunity....
- Voted to defer, 24 Sept 2002
- Re opened, 6 Feb 3002

namespaceDocument-8

If one exists, what is it used for?
- Machine readable, human readable, or both?
- RDDL challenge and RDF

xlinkScope-23

Hypertext links in XML seem rather desirable
- Is XLink the answer? Is Xlink 1.0 the answer?
- Working links in random UI-related XML grammars
- Overloading multiple links on one element?
- Task force to gather requirements for XLink revision?
- HTML WG tracking issue for XHTML 2.0

Benefits of TAG work to date

Real, in-depth discussion on what Web Architecture means
Improved consistency between specifications
Interesting interactions with Web Services on
definition of Agent
- WSA and TAG revised their definitions to mesh well
Updating some primary specifications in response to
discussions and issues raised

Web Architecture Document

Working Draft published 26 March 2003
Three major sections:
Identification
- Universe of resources with a single universal addressing scheme,
  URIs (should that become IRIs?)
Representation
- Resources are represented using a nonexclusive set of
  data formats.
Interaction
- Protocols such as HTTP are used for interchange of resource
  representations; MIME plays a key role

Identification

Bulk of the work, so far
Comparing identifiers
- some of this moved into URI spec
URI Schemes
- sample Good practice: avoid introducing new uri schemes
fragment identifiers
Dereferencing
- sample Principle: Identify important resources with URIs
servicing URIs

Representations

Pretty Raw
What are representations
Format design,
- use of XML, namespaces
- namespace documents
Separating presentation and content
- Continuum from abstract to concrete
- Progressive loss of stylistic choices
- Interaction with multimodal and device independence

More on Web Arch doc

Interaction
- So raw it's blue
Some words on understanding REST
What is a principle vs good practice vs design choice
Other sections - general design principles, glossary

Plans for progressing documents

Last Call on Architecture document

Two alternatives
- Model 1: issue Last Call in 2003
  - Trim scope of Arch doc to "REST" Web
  - Exclude Semantic Web, Web Services
  - Useful subset or damaging division?
- Model 2: issue Last Call in 2004
  - Scope is whole Web
  - Semantic web and Web services integrated
  - Consistent architecture or prolonged confusion?

Namespace Document status

Two alternatives
- Model 1: Publish as Note
  - Not TAG business to create this sort of spec?
  - No life-after-rec worries
  - Note ignored, waste of time
- Model 2: REC Track
  - Follow through on existing effort
  - Requires ongoing effort through standards track
  - Improve interoperability,
    promote use of well-documented namespaces

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