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The Charter of the Web Application Formats Working Group includes a deliverable titled Specification of a declarative format for applications and user interfaces. This document includes the status of this deliverable and a recommendation that the Working Group stop formal work on this deliverable and consider this Note as the one and only publication for this deliverable. This Note also includes some potential options if W3C Members choose to do related work.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This is a W3C Working Group Note of the Declarative Formats for Applications and User Interfaces, developed by the Web Application Formats Working Group as part of the Rich Web Clients Activity.
Please send comments about this document to public-appformats@w3.org (public archive) with a subject that is prefaced with "[dfaui]".
Publication as a Working Group Note does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
On 15 November 2005 the W3C announced the decision to start the Web Application Formats (WAF) Working Group (WG). This WG's Charter includes a deliverable named Specification of a declarative format for applications and user interfaces (called DFAUI in this document) and it is defined as follows:
This Note includes a recommendation that the Working Group formally stop its work on this deliverable and consider this Note as the one and only document the WG will publish for the DFAUI. The document also includes the status of this deliverable and some options if Members choose to do DFAUI-related work.
The WAF WG consists of individuals from approximately twenty W3C Members plus two Invited Experts. Two of the WG's members are explicitly identified in the group's charter as potential contributors of a DFAUI base language but neither of these members made significant contributions.
The WG reviewed two inputs from its members:
The WG reviewed both of these inputs and created a draft DFAUI: Use Cases and Requirements document [DFAUI-UC] but the W3C never published the document.
The DFAUI was an agenda item on all six of the WG's face-to-face meetings that preceded the publication of this Note. It was also an agenda item on all of the WG's weekly voice conferences in 2006 and several of the group's 2007 voice conferences. Despite the significant time allocated to the DFAUI, progress on the deliverable was very slow, particularly compared to the WG's other specifications in progress: Widgets 1.0 Requirements, Widgets 1.0, Read Access for Web Resources, XML Binding Language (XBL) 2.0, XBL2 Primer.
The slow progress on the DFAUI was first reported to the W3C's Hypertext Coordination Group in the WG's bi-weekly status report on 10 November 2006 [Member-only]. The slow progress was first made Public via an e-mail from the Chair to the WG's Public mail list on 15 November 2006. Additionally, Telefonica's MyMobileWeb project's position presentation at the W3C's June 2007 public Declarative Models of Distributed Web Applications Workshop includes some of the issues related to the DFAUI's slow progress.
For all practical purposes, worked on the DFAUI deliverable stopped after the WG's April 2007 face-to-face meeting.
The primary reasons and factors that contributed to the slow progress on, and low participation in the DFAUI are:
The WG identifies the following options to begin or re-start work on a declarative format for applications and user interfaces or parts thereof: