(From the email of Bert Bos to the Programme Committee)

Here are some of the topics that I'm interested in.

- what are the (most important) device features of a device (or preferences of a user) for content adaptation, in particular for adaptation of the style/layout, rather than of the content?

- what can be improved in the existing mechanisms of CSS Media Queries, HTML LINK and OBJECT elements and SMIL SWITCH element and what is better handled by a separate technology?

- it is obviously easier for content providers if all devices of a certain class accept the same content (and possibly adapt things themselves), i.e., they all conform to a common profile. What exactly are the limits of profiles and when do we recommend feature sets instead?

- what are the "sweet spots" that balance usability for a content author vs automatic processing for the computer? RDF is one extreme, very flexible and very unusable; an image is the other, unintelligible for the computer, but can be made with a pencil and paper.

- it is not hard to come up with 2 or 3 new properties in CSS that allow an author to specify the (high-level) layout for each type of screen in just 3 or 4 easy lines, either added to an existing style sheet or separate. But then the content adaptation and the layout adaptation use different technologies (DI Content Selection vs CSS). Is that less or more usable than a single technology for the two? (Less, because you write the same conditions on device features twice; more, because those conditions aren't the same anyway, and layout is easier done together with the rest of the style...)

- what is the role of XSLT and XQuery? You can express quite complicated adaptations in them (though not the conditions under which they apply), but they are probably beyond the means of most authors.

Bert

Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/ 
http://www.w3.org/people/bos/ W3C/ERCIM 
bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93 
+33 (0)4 92 38 76 92 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France