Charles Ying (
charles.ying@openwave.com) - Openwave Systems, Inc.
This document presents Openwave's recommendations for the W3C and the Web Applications and Compound Document Workshop. Openwave believes in the importance of an open and robust specification for web applications, especially related to the mobile communications industry.
Due to the scope of the effort outlined by this workshop, good coordination and standards practices is equally as important as choosing the appropriate technology, and this document advises on both.
It's important to define a viable, usable, practical solution that can withstand strong competition from proprietary solutions. Attention must be given to building and rallying support for a strong developer community.
This specification must have good usability, low barrier to entry, and good interoperability among implementers. Listening and adapting to feedback from the developer community and putting effort towards studying its usability is crucial. For implementers, building a strong, comprehensive test suite and interoperability testing is crucial.
One unifying specification (and/or profiles and revisions) should be created to address both compound documents and web applications. It should have a distinct brand identity to build mind share and avoid fragmentation.
When specifying profiles for mobile environments, optional components or features must be removed, clearly specified to a limited set, or reduced to a minimum. Mobile environments have higher constraints on available resources and interoperability which must be considered in developing a specification.
This specification must integrate XHTML, CSS, SVG and ECMAScript.
- XHTML and CSS provide easy content flow and layout, form entry, presentation styling, structured content, and a clear migration path.
- SVG provides rich, dynamic presentation, and animation.
- ECMAScript provides an easy procedural language for application logic, and a clear migration path.
This specification should take advantage of and clarify each standard's defined integration points. XHTML defines the object tag element and SVG defines the foreignObject tag element for integration. One integration method for ECMAScript must be clarified and/or defined.
This specification should provide a set of commonly used toolkits. Rather than performing common operations in ECMAScript, the functionality is implemented natively and the hosting environment provides high-level interfaces to the content developer. The following toolkits should be defined:
- XML Parser Toolkit - Performs common operations related to parsing, styling and transforming XML data. Examples include providing a DOM parser, pull-parser and XML template engine.
- Database Toolkit - Manages access to collections of data, optionally persisted or network synchronized.
- Network Access Toolkit - Manages access to connect and communicate with the network, at a socket layer (TCP), transport (HTTP, WSP), and/or application layer (XML-RPC).
- Security Toolkit - Performs basic encryption and authentication operations.
This specification must also define a clear and specific subset profile for mobile environments which may include XHTML Basic, CSS Mobile Profile, SVG Tiny, and ECMAScript Mobile Profile.
This specification must also support more advanced styling and modularity for building custom components, specifically custom UI elements. SVG-RCC may be one possible solution.
Defining a standard set of UI control elements is quite difficult, and for mobile environments is not needed, though there may potentially be a need to define a set for desktop environments. The motivation for specifying a standard UI element (if any) should be performance considerations, implementation reuse (e.g., i18n text field input), and integrating the environment's native look and feel.
Openwave Systems, Inc. is the leading independent provider of open software products and services for the communications industry. Openwave's breadth of products, including mobile phone software, multimedia messaging software (MMS), email, location and mobile gateways, along with its worldwide expertise enable its customers to deliver innovative and differentiated data services.