W3C

- DRAFT -

TAG Southampton Meeting, Day 2

18 Sep 2007

Agenda

See also: IRC log

Attendees

Present
Stuart_Williams, Noah_Mendelsohn, Tim_Berners-Lee*, Norm_Walsh, Henry_S._Thompson, Dan_Connolly, Rhys_Lewis, Dave_Orchard*, TV_Raman*
Regrets
Tim_Berners-Lee*, Dave_Orchard*, TV_Raman*
Chair
Stuart Williams
Scribe
Rhys, Norm

Contents


 

 

TAG Planning and Review

<Rhys> Scribe: Rhys

<scribe> Scribenick: Rhys

discussion of TAG goals and directions

SW: Anything particular to report to the November W3C membership meeting?

discussion roams over maintenance of webarch vol1, a 2nd vol, security, p2p, web 2.0, ...

RL: OpenAjax Alliance could be a good place to start. The major players in Ajax libraries are members

<DanC_lap> http://www.w3.org/2007/06/mobile-ajax/

Discussion about what TAG might do for the workshop.

TimBL edits an outline (@@copy/link)

NW: I think I'd be tempted to draft the new document and then you could choose to move that to modifications to the existing AWWW.

HT: Better to say that there is a set of things on which we are working, and then decide where the changes live

SW: Can see working on volume 2 leading to errata for volume 1
... Asks how much of the list that Tim has produced could be shared with the AC
... Wraps up by asking if people are ok with use of tracker? General feeling is positive.

URNsAndRegistries-50 (ISSUE-50)

<scribe> ACTION: [DONE] David Orchard to explore the space of external registries and to post to the tag member list. ACTION-32 [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action01]

<scribe> ACTION: Henry S. Thompson to revise URNsAndRegistries-50 finding in response to F2F discussion [CONTINUES] [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action02]

HT Looks at diary to try and get an estimate for a date. End of October. Stuart updates the action due date.

xmlFunctions-34 (ISSUE-34)

HT: Same date for Action 26 which is part of issue 34. Stuart updates the action due date

<scribe> ACTION: Henry S. Thompson to Henry to prepare new draft of xmlFunctions-34 ACTION-26 [CONTINUES] [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action03]

SW: Any discussion necessary here?

HT: No. I have the notes on what I want to write.

DC: points out that the GRDDL specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/) references TAG issues 8 and 34.
... The GRDDL spec postponed decision related to xmlFunctions-34
... I was wondering about urgency around these two issues. Now that GRDDL is a rec, the urgency for that group has gone, but the implementers will still be interested.

namespaceDocument-8 (ISSUE-8)

<ht> http://www.w3.org/XML/2007/09/XMLSchema.html

SW: Projects the above document

HT: This is the draft namespace document for XML Schema.

SW: Projects the source,

HT: Points out the <head profile=.... which is the incantation that marks the document as GRDDL enabled. The <link rel='transformation... together with the profile attribute identifies the transformation to be applied for GRDDL

<ht> http://www.w3.org/XML/2007/09/xsd.owl

HT: The stylesheet runs when you want to extract the RDF from the document.

SW: Projects http://www.w3.org/XML/2007/09/xsd.owl , which is the RDF from the namespace document

HT: Describes the resulting RDF, which he anticipates that DC and TBL probably won't like.

SW: Opens the tabulator

HT: Describes the appearance of the OWL in the tabulator
... Datatype includes the list of XML Schema datatypes. This was one of the things that DC wanted to see in the RDF generated from the namespace document.

NM: So is the transformation stylesheet generic or specific to this namespace document?

HT: It's mainly generic with some specific parts for the schema datatypes
... Based this on Norm's work, but changed it.
... Explains the approach in the RDF. Shows use of RDDL validation 'purpose'

<DanC_lap> ACTION: HenryS to fix .htaccess in 2007/09 so that .owl files get the right mime type [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action04]

HT: Describes the natureKey and target properties and their relationship
... Invites Tim and Dan to look at the three documents which embody a proposal for how to use RDDL with namespace documents

<Stuart> http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#boolean

<ht> http://www.w3.org/XML/2007/09/XMLSchema.html#boolean

HT: When the document is installed then URIs of the form above will be available to the Tabulator.

NM: Let me put in English what I think is happening. In this case, the spirit of what you are doing is that we had a problem with RDDL natures and purposes where the URIs seemed to be of the wrong class. This approach is not implementing an inverse functional property.

HT: It's not an inverse functional relationship, because the same relationship might apply between multiple objects

DC: The relationship is between three things.

NW: One triple isn't enough.

NM: Feels right about the relationships involved. It looks rigorous. But if any normal user has to do all of this then it looks a problem.

HT: They don't have to. This will all be part of RDDL.

NM: Ok, so this is now grounded in RDF. I want to add this to some other RDF that I'm creating. Are they going to be able to use this?

HT: Yes.

NW: Does this shape of model address the issue about using DTDs and Schemas as natures?

NM: As one of those people, I'm happy that this addresses that.

DC: We need to talk about the URI in the type of the namespace.

<DanC_lap> "This type of information resource is called a namespace document. " -- http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#namespace-document

HT: Should be calling it NamespaceDocument, not Namespace
... We should be getting it via a 303

<DanC_lap> "Another benefit of using URIs to build XML namespaces is that the namespace URI can be used to identify an information resource that contains useful information, machine-usable and/or human-usable, about terms in the namespace. This type of information resource is called a namespace document. "

DC: Disagrees

TBL: What would be the use of introducing a new concept like 303 for the namespace document.

NM: I don't necessarily agree that all information resources are documents. The term namespaces was introduced by XML. The namespace documents are whatever that namespace defines them to be.
... I see those documents as information resources. A namespace means you have a URI, and whoever owns it gets to say what is defined and what is not

<ht> Here is the finding where the TAG defines what a namespace is: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState.html

<DanC_lap> (no. the namespace document is not a representation of the resource in question; it _is_ the resource in question. "This type of information resource is called a namespace document. " )

NM: I think that can be transferred in a message. I view the namespace document as a representation of the resource that is identified as the namespace URI

<ht> HST's position: Namespaces are ineffable, identified by namespace URI, namespace documents have information about them, 303 is appropriate

NM: that does justify the 200 return code rather than 303 on access to the namespace URI

<ht> TBL's position: Namespaces and namespace documents can usefully share a URI, so 200 is appropriate

<ht> NM's position: Namespaces are information resources, of which namespace documents are representations, so 200 is appropriate

SW: I think there is a clash of cultures from two communities. I can live with the story that Noah has told of there being a representation of the namespace that is returned on access.
... I think the semweb community does actually use two URIs, one with a trailing # and one without. One identifies the namespace, the other allows me to retrieve a representation.
... The XML community doesn't use the trailing # and so has only one to identify the namespace. To identify the document, there would have to be another, perhaps unrelated, URI

TBL: It's true that the URIs with the # exist, but I've never found that I actually had to write statements about the URI with the #
... Which is why I asked Henry the question about this extra node in the RDF

HT: It's because it is the namespace that is the subject of these statements, not the namespace document.#

DC: Sometimes the subject of a normative reference is a datatype, sometimes, in this RDF

HT: That's right.

<Zakim> Norm, you wanted to ask what the URI of the XML Schema namespace *is* if the putative URI is a URI for the XML Namespace Document

NW: If XML schema is the URI of the namespace document, then what is the URI of the namespace? Think this has been overtaken by Stuart's comment

HT: Think that what the XML community thinks of as the URI of the namespace is actually the URI of the namespace document

NM: There is definitely one resource, which is the namespace, and may return a representation. But there is nothing that precludes us from creating a second URI for the document.

TBL: The RDF community has never really concerned itself with namespaces. You could make assertions about them, but in practice it doesn't happen.

HT: TAG has published documents that discuss namespaces and properties of namespaces and we have to build a story about that.

<DanC_lap> (where does http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState.html say anything about namespaces? it says things about names in a namespace)

<Zakim> DanC_lap, you wanted to note that this { <XMLSchema> rdf:type xml:Namespace } invites unending philosophical discussion and doesn't seem to be necessary to address

<Norm> If we think that hashless URIs are for documents, we need to use 303 for the ones that we use as namespaces and we have to encourage XML authors to use hashed URIs. Maybe.

DC: The impasse we're stuck in would go away if we deleted the rdf:type

NM: If we do decide to do that, we could close this issue. But I think it will bite us in future and we should probably open a new issue to cover this

<ht> HT: Right, we've addressed the requirements we came in to this with w/o the rdf:type, so I can live with dropping it

SW: What would that issue cover?

HT: The question is what do XML namespace URIs, as used in the existing web of XML, identify. What kinds of things are they?

<DanC_lap> (we've "run into the sand" in that we have 2 coherent positions, neither has convinced the other, and no new information seems to be forthcoming)

<timbl> http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2005/ajar/ajaw/tab

<timbl> http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2005/ajar/ajaw/tab?uri=http://www.w3.org/XML/2007/09/xsd.owl

<ht> That it is reasonable (indeed recommended) to serve something in response to a GET on a namespace URI is uncontested

<ht> But until we can say whether the resource identified by a (traditional/OF XML) namespace URI is an information resource or not, we don't know whether or not to reply with a 200 or a 303

TBL: The later version of the tabulator (see above URI) infers information from the HTTP headers, including the response code.
... This inference of the result being a document is from the TAG finding. (document is a pun for information resource in this case)

SW: I think that I heard Henry and Norm take an action to produce a new draft of the finding

<scribe> ACTION: Norm to produce a new draft of the namespace documents finding based on 18 Sep discussion (@@trackbot got it?) [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action05]

<trackbot-ng> Sorry, couldn't find user - Norm

<DanC_lap> trackbot-ng, status

<DanC_lap> Rhys, try Norman

Note to scribe to fix up the action to be against Norm

Issue is Self-Describing Web

NM: I have a set of comments against the last draft. Have double checked with Tim about interest in a new draft. So lets continue the action. I feel that I know what to do.

<DanC_lap> (this relates to URI-based extensibility and standardizedFieldValues-51 )

SW: How about aiming for a draft in time for tech plenary week. How about November 2nd?

<Zakim> ht, you wanted to point to http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState.html

DC: Observes that there is an overlap with URI-based extensibility and would that be something for TP panel?

NM: Could be appropriate. Bug me for slides if you want them.
... Should we go through the webarch presentation over lunch?

[break for lunch]

<Norm> ScribeNick: Norm

<scribe> Scribe: Norm

Web 2.0 and Web Architecture (and TAG Blog mechanics)

SW: At Google, we said this was a place where we'd like to do somethinking, but we haven't really bitten into it at all.
... One of the questions for me is, when you have the client-side scripting stuff, the representations behave differently becauase they actually interact back with the servers
... Application interaction, not just animation and forms.
... There are questions about web architecture, bookmarking; we've had a bit of a thread about fragement identifiers and scripting.
... Are there other factors of web 2.0 that might be stressing the architecture as we have writ it.

HT: I'd like to add the cross-domain scripting issue. I don't even know what's happening in the relevant constituencies.
... TimBL describe some work, we should check on that.

SW: Is that the access control proposal?

DC: Yes, that's it.

The "public:" HTTP header

DC: Is this stuff covered by webarch? Yes, sort of. Some parts get relearned, like when to use GET
... One of the episodes was the google accelerator which would follow GET links so if they did deletes, that was an issue.
... It seems like people are paying a lot of attention to the URI space that they're using and when to use GET/POST.
... Sometimes it's nice if the folks using your work know about it so they read it.
... What's starting to get deployed that isn't described by specs is the fragment identifers that don't mean anything if the javascript isn't there.

NM: When you first go to Google Maps, it appears to violate the principle that things should have URIs. But if you look closely, you can get it.
... But there are issues there about how many other implementors would have taken the care to do that.
... Obviously there must be issues with keeping the address bar constantly up-to-date.
... Is anyone drilling on that?

DC: The OpenAJAX folks.

NM: No, I mean on our side. It can be very seductive to give a URI to the beginning.

DC: Oh, right, it used to be free and now it isn't.

NM: And it might be quite difficult.

RL: We might want to explore what states do benefit from having a URI?

NM: Yes, but I think if we went to the OpenAjax folks, we could ask of the library implementors, how easy do you make it for your users to get URIs?

<DanC_lap> (priority[tag_blog]++ )

NM: Once users are getting value out of something, it tends to persist. But they need to know that there's something there. A link to a map instead of a PDF of the directions.

<Stuart> FYI... WAF-WG WD on "Enabling Read Access for Web Resources" is at http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/

DC: Another side of this issue is the economics of the situation. I think it's very interesting to look at the fact that Wikipedia works but lots fo things built out of MediaWiki don't. Why?
... How much value do you have to give to how many people before something takes off?

TBL: That's a web science sort of question, but not really a web architecture sort of question

RL: I think Noah
... Noah's question about Ajax libraries and URIs is a good one.

NM: I'm still uncomfortable with the "Web 2.0" banner. I think they're all important. (Scribe may not have followed)
... In carrying things under the Web 2.0 banner, we risk confusion.
... Web 2.0: Rich Interaction, Web 2.0: something else

NW: I'd be just as happy to lose the Web 2.0 prefix in that case.

DC: Maybe blogging is the right answer here.

NM: Maybe, but one of our responsibilities is to liase with external organizations. My first question is, are they paying attention to the right issues.
... If we find that they aren't, then we need to think about the right awy to preceed.

RL: It sounds like trawling through some of the libraries might be useful.

NM: Or maybe just contacting the implementors and asking them.

SW: The mutterings of "blog" reminded me that we had an action on Tim wrt investigating URIs that we might use.

TBL: Ok, I talked to Dan and found some things out. All the /blog/ URIs use an infrastructure we don't want to use.
... I don't want to go with /tag/blog, because it sets a bad precedent.

SW: Do you want to propose a URI?

TBL: /2001/tag/blog?

SW: There are certainly TAG members who object.

DC: I think Raman objects on the grounds that remembering /2001/ is rude.

SW: I forced /2001/tag/blog over Raman's objection. I ultimately became uncomfortable with that course of action.

NM: I played a role in this, because I commented on the WBS form. I can say that anything that works for you guys works for me.

SW: There was /blog/tag that was a close second, but it has the infrastructure limitation.

Some discussion of the infrastructure issues

It would be nice to be able to migrate between blog engines.

DC: Yes, but we don't have that problem.

TBL: We could ask for /blog/tag and ask for it to be movable type.

DC: Movable type is not a supported blog tool (by the W3C admin staff)

NM: Do all of these give you moderately good control over styling?
... I explored this with HTML and CSS.

DC: Yes, I expect you can because it's popular.
... Two intersting things about the Movable Type system are that (1) it would build the readership of the /qa blog that we're using for HTML, and (2) it uses the bake not fry model. GETs are just regular web pages. If the infrastructure falls over, the pages still stay there.
... The downside is that you have to wait 15 minutes to see what it looks like.

Some discussion of that problem.

DC: Maybe we should go with the supported stuff and if the blog falls over its their fault.

NM: Word press?

DC: One of the issues was that community blogs with multiple authors was not directly supported by Word press. It could be a non-issue these days, but when the system team was picking, it was an issue.

SW: Who cares what tool we use?

Several hands

<Zakim> timbl, you wanted to say we actually have also talked for example about web sites, which have no URIs in the architecture either. namespaces are similar

<Zakim> Norm, you wanted to say that if we decide that aa hashless URI must be the namespace *document* then the bit I said above

(NOTE FROM SCRIBE, SHOULD HAVE DRAINED QUEUE DIFFERENTLY)

NM: I care a lot if it interferes with what it appearance.

SW: I don't see how we're going to make a choice other than picking one and trying.

DC: I've done some research and proposed Moveable Type.

SW: I'm more than happy with that.

NW: I was sort of hoping that I'd be able to just inject my atom entries into the TAG blog feed, not cut and paste. But I could live with cut and paste, I guess

SW: Here are the results of the survey I setup earlier.

<Stuart> http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/34270/BlogURI/results

SW: By my reckoning /blog/tag wins.

DC: I just don't know if it's feasible.

<scribe> ACTION: Dan to investigate the feasibility of having a Movable Type blog at /blog/tag [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action06]

<trackbot-ng> Created ACTION-49 - Investigate the feasibility of having a Movable Type blog at /blog/tag [on Dan Connolly - due 2007-09-25].

SW: That was introduced by the notion of writing blogs in the Web 2.0 space, I think we can return there now.
... TBL's action can now be marked as done.
... So, DC, you think it might be more effective to write blogs in this area?

DC: Yep.

NW: I think it's worth a try.
... I've been looking at Ajax; I might have a blog post in that space.

RL: I'm interested in that too

TBL: It's interesting that the lack of modularity in Javascript is a serious problem in projects like the Tabulator

DC: Oh! I have an almost finished blog post about that!

<DanC_lap> http://homer.w3.org/~connolly/projects/grddljs/raw-file/f51f4e01ea4b/devnotes.html

Some informal discussion of various aspect of Javascript

and Javascript programming. Implied global variables; code compression; compilation; etc.

Some discussion of the xmlHttpRequest spec and the state of the world wrt its examples

SW: So this is a possible blog entry.

DC: Yes.
... One message is "lack of a module system" hurts.

<scribe> ACTION: Rhys to investigate two AJAX libraries and see how well they support exposing URIs for intermediate results. [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action07]

<trackbot-ng> Created ACTION-50 - Investigate two AJAX libraries and see how well they support exposing URIs for intermediate results. [on Rhys Lewis - due 2007-09-25].

<DanC_lap> trackbot-ng, ACTION-50 is due in a month

Agenda review for the afternoon

SW: We'll work on TAG Soup after the break.

TBL: I'd like to come back to HTTP redirections.

Some discussion of the overlap between Rhys's HTTP range finding and the Cool URIs document.

TBL: I think we should say that 301 should always generate a warning
... I think the purl.org folks use this.
... And we should say that 302 should bookmark the *original* URI.

Some planning discussion for how to organize the rest of the day

<DanC_lap> (hmm... yes, 301 and 302 have this link updating meaning... it's less clear to me why that needs TAG attention; it's in the HTTP spec, no?)

reviewing the Cool URIs document (ISSUE-57 cont.)

RL: Yesterday we were trying to get through the Cool URIs review which is a prerequisite for some of the other decisions

<timbl> https://gnowsis.opendfki.de/repos/gnowsis/papers/2006_11_concepturi/html/cooluris_sweo_note.html

Continuing review at section 3. URIs for Real-World Objects

NW: I think the second sentence of the third paragraph should say "access" or "dereference" not "look up"

Some discussion of the colloquial use of "look up"

NW: If no one else is bothered by it, I won't press the point.

TBL: We run into the definition of information resource in the last paragraph of section 3.
... Suppose you were to make a mistake here, then you'd use a URI for the resource and return a document.

DC: The mistake is to have a URI for Alice and have it return 200.

TBL: But what about the case of the bible; are they being clear enough about the distinction between a document and metadata about it?

HT: That doesn't make what's written there wrong, just incomplete.

<raman> raman from the bus to work

TBL: Suppose you always had two distinct resources?

DC: No, it says "not clearly and obviously a document"

NM: I'm tempted here to push a bit on the distinction between "information resource" and "document"
... There are things that I choose to believe are information resources that aren't documents.

TBL For instance?

<timbl> ----------------------

NM: For me, documents have a beginning a middle and an end.

<timbl> A relational table

NM: For example, a relational table. The rows have no order in the database.
... So it doesn't have a beginning, middle and end.

TBL: What about a relational table in a CSV file?

NM: That's a specific serialization of the table.
... The CSV file is a document. The point is that when you have DB2 or Oracle, the table isn't in general stored in anything that you could identify as serial or continuous.

TBL: But a table is information, right?

NM: An RDF graph is another example. It's an information resource but not a document.

SW: You slipped into the "representation" sense of document.

<raman> Does a hypertext document that is a directory index truly have a beginning an end and a middle?

(Scribe may not have recorded the slip accurately)

NM: The reason that I'm re-raising this is because this says "if you have the least doubt that something is a document" then do something else (hash or 303).
... If I believe a relational table, I think I should be able to return a 200.

TBL: We agree about the information resource, but maybe not the document. Can you think of something that we might disagree is an information resource.

DC: Can I try a few more.
... An rdf:Class?
... The integer 7.

TBL: thumbs down; NM: thumbs up.

DC: A set of integers

TBL: thumbs down; NM: thumbs up.

NW: What about the set of numbers written in an HTML document?

TBL: That's a borderline case.

NM: What about the set of integers that are the primes less than 30?

<raman> given http://examples.com/integers how can you tell if I generated the integers or whether I wrote it in an html file?

Beats me, raman :-)

TBL: A picture with random black and white pixels?
... Yes, it's an information resource. It's not very useful.
... If the thing has a name or has other properties attached to it, then it's definitely an information resource.

SW: I think I could go with a set of numbers being an information resource but not an individual number.

NW: I could believe *anything* can be an information resource, that it's not a meaningful distinction.

NM: Is there a URI for each integer?

<raman> http://example.com/integers#7

DC: I'd have to think about that a little bit; I think you could do it with data: URIs.

RL: An observation: when you said relational table, TBL may have hard "data in the table, plus columns, and column names"

(Scribe notes: TBL left room to take a phone call)

Break for 15 minutes

<raman> I think this distinction is a red herring and mostly bogus (this == document vs information resource) document is better thought of as a serialization of a resource

<Stuart> serialisation of a resource.... or it's current state?

<raman> serialization of the current state of the resource

<Stuart> Yes dave... just about to dail in ourselves

<Stuart> zakim this will be tag

<raman> will call in like I did yesterday about 10 minutes before the hour. Still on the bus going to work

<timbl> Raman said, 'I think this distinction is a red herring and mostly bogus (this == document vs information resource) document is better thought of as a serialization of a resource"

<Stuart> Ok... raman... we'll get going as best we can... Tim will likely depart 15min before the hour.

<raman> will dial in at 14:50 UTC 15:50 BST

Meeting resumes

XMLVersioning-41 (ISSUE-41 cont)

DO: I posted some updates to the terminologies and strategies last night.
... I made some of the edit's Tim suggested wrt language and extensions. We now require a mapping function of some kind.
... The interesting corrolary is that languages like WS-Security aren't extensible.

<DanC_lap> (looking at http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070917.html ... )

WS-Security mandates a fault if there's anything unrecognizable, so even though the schema has wildcards, it isn't extensible.

scribe: I reworded other parts to reflect these changes.

SW: How do you feel we're doing?

DO: I think we're making progress. I think maybe it would be OK if we never got to finishing the XML document and concentrated on the others.

SW: There was some feeling here that there'd be value in seeing stories about various strategies that have actually been deployed.

DO: I've been using HTML as an example but it sounds like folks want more.

TBL: I think the strategies document with some stories added to help people understand is going to be more effective.
... More effective than making it mathematically coherent. But the terminology document is useful to help make us understand.

DO: Stuart was moving us to having more examples in the terminology document as well.

SW: I was thinking of small, toy languages to illustrate the various sets and other terms.

DO: That would be fine by me.

NM: I was a little surprised at what Tim said because I thought a lot of the drift of the discussion yesterday was that we needed to connect teh strategy stuff to the terminology.

<dorchard> Here's the sets with more examples on xml.com

<dorchard> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/12/20/a-theory-of-compatible-versions.html?page=1

NM: We don't want to intimidate novice readers, but some detail in the terminology could be used to build in strategies.

<Zakim> Noah, you wanted to encourage tie to terminology

NM: Not putting it in people's faces I understand, but leaving them disconnected seems wrong.

TBL: Maybe the terms are two technical.

NM: I still have some reservations about whether or not accept set and defined set are going to be useful terms.

<timbl> TBL: Don't use the terms differently i the two docs.

NM: I agree that wouldn't be good in the strategies document.
... I don't want to build up all that terminology if we aren't going to use it. We could kill it but I think that would be unfortuante.

SW: Dave, do you have a top three messages you'd like to get out?

DO: "Make languages extensible" is the top one, but then there others that fall out of that.

TBL: But what does extensible mean?

DO: Exactly

TBL: I think you have to be careful that you don't wind up begging the question.

SW: So if someone says "how do I do that", do we have an answer/

DO: We did have an answer for XML Schema about four years ago. But the pushback has generally been that we need to be more balanced in our treatment of versioning.
... So we've made a more generalized document, but I've tried to collect all the non-XML related ones together in the forwards-compatibility section of the strategies document.
... Forwards compatibility is 2.2.2, backwards compatibility is 2.2.3, etc.

TBL: I'd like to give war stories from W3C specs. Not necessarily things that you were involved in.

DO: If examples need to be introduced to illustrate what we mean, I would have preferred to use an example language that's being created so that someone now would be able to follow the rules.

TBL: What sticks with people is a horror story. You can point out that HTML grew because it had an extensibility story that worked. I wonder if something like CSS has had problems.

DO: I can think of many XML languages that have had extensibility problems.

TBL: Can you think of something specific? Maybe something like the validator not taking extensibility into account.

DO: We could use XML 1.1 as our horror story.

TBL: AS a failure. Yep, that works.

<dorchard> :-)

DO: XML didn't follow many of the guidelines that were available in the forwards compatible section.

NM: I think we need to step back a little, XML is extensible in many dimensions just not all of them.

SW: We would like to record our thanks to W3C for hosting last night's supper.

TBL: Our local hosts provided the transport, thanks to them too.

TBL departs.

DO: One thing this has provoked is that XML 1.0 and 1.1 is a poster child for versioning problems. But do we really think that the versioning finding is going to go into that much detail? If not, then I'm not sure there's value in showing failures.

SW: There are success stories.

NM: What about http? There's been a pretty good migration from 1.0 to 1.1, hasn't there?

DO: I picked HTML not HTTP because is HTML is a W3C spec.

Some discussion of W3C involved in HTTP

DO: I was trying to pick a language format not a protocol, because the tradeoffs are different.

NM: The number of folks who know the HTML story well enough to follow are probably much greater than for HTTP. I withdraw the suggestion.

SW: So that'll make it into the terminology finding.

NM: That was supposed to really press the accept set/defined set. But I'm not sure it's usfule without a deep discussion.

SW: Does anyone have a strong sense of how we make progress from where we are?

DO: I got feedback to introduce more examples and on the terminology section.
... There's work I can do, but I don't know if we would feel like we'd gotten measurably closer to being done with these documents, I don't know.

SW: If you think about where the end of the tunnel is, it's difficult to estimate where that is, partly because we've been at it so long.
... You end up down in the document and not necessarily standing back to see if what we're doing is in support of the goals.

<raman> stuck in traffic will be closer to the hour than not before I call in.

SW: I'm not sure that "fix this" "fix this" "fix this" is going to wind up bringing us closer to completion.

DO: Yes. I wanted to tell a story more about XML versioning; now we've got a much broader story. I hope we don't expand it any further.
... Some folks have been advocating for a cookbook approach.

SW: We've got three documents; one of the things that's bruising on all of us is the size. If we wanted to pick one piece, which would it be?
... I would suggest the strategies document.

NM: I still think we're thrashing around. I don't think we've determined what success is. The documents should be in service to a goal.
... Five to ten pages turns into weeks and months of TAG effort. So I think first of all, we should imagine that the final documents will be much smaller.
... My feeling is there should be a small number of main points and it should be possible to enumerate them quickly and concisely.
... For example, we give the community a small number of terms for usefully discussing the issues; show them how to make content is forwards-compatible; etc. Basically, get to the point where we can say here are our goals 1, 2, 3, 4...
... Then write out a ToC and start to fill it in so that we know we're going to achieve those goals.
... Get some agreement about the message and work on fullfilling that.
... I think lots of people come to this with assumptions that they don't even know they have.
... So I'd like to bring a little bit of rigor from the terminology and a few small problems.
... In that sense, I think we should build up from zero, starting with the text Dave has already written.
... That's my reaction to "pick a part".

DO: I'd be totally fine if we had a document that said "Versioning: Fowards Compatibility" and we just focused on that.

<DanC_lap> (hmm... reducing the scope to "Forward Compatibility" sounds interesting.)

DO: But this focussed approach sounds nice and is very hard to deliver on. Review tends to make the scope creep.
... As soon as we say that we should have this particular focus, the yardsticks change and we end up pushing into different areas trying for complete coverage.

SW: Dan says that reducing scope to fowards compatibilit sounds interesting

<Noah> Forwards compat sounds just a bit narrow, but once you have it explained, is talking about backwards compat really much more than a para or two?

SW: One of the problems is that we're having a hard time concentrating on a piece of work small enough to accomplish consensus. The bigger it is, the harder it is to win consensus.
... I think we need to wrap this little piece up before we move along.
... Trying to follow up on what Noah is suggesting, I think that requires that we stand back a bit from the artifacts that we have and go back to the process of picking our messages.

NM: Standing back in a sense; I think we'd go through the documents and try to summarize each section in a sentence or two and then try to prioritize that.

DO: I could take a stab at that for the strategies document.

NM: I think we need to iterate over that as a group until we have consensus on the ToC.

SW: I wonder if Dave could use a buddy for that to shorten the feedback loop

DC: I'd like to focus on things with a length of 1 sentence.

SW: I don't think we can continue that exercise at this meeting.

<DanC_lap> (I think the Dave's done what somebody can do about page counts.)

DO: I'd like to take a stab at reducing the strategies document down to something more focussed

SW: I think what Noah wanted was basically one or two sentences of meta-statement about each section. And work down from the top.
... I'm hanging back on putting an action on Dave because I'm afraid it won't be successful.
... Something coming back with a consensus of two would be an improvement, I think.

<DanC_lap> target: ~3 one-sentence points, touching on stories invoving HTML, XSLT, and XML 1.1

Raman: We've been changing the requirements.

NM: I don't think they've ever been defined.

<scribe> ACTION: David and Dan work together to articulate the versioning story that the TAG wants to tell. [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action08]

<trackbot-ng> Created ACTION-51 - And Dan work together to articulate the story that the TAG wants to tell. [on David Orchard - due 2007-09-25].

trackbot-ng, action-51 due 2007-09-26

TagSoupIntegration-54 (ISSUE-54)

Review of agenda and actions

SW: ACTION-7 was on Dan

DC: That remains open; I got as far as trying to set it up and finding out that the intersection of available times was empty.
... There's a corresponding thread in email; let's look there.

<DanC_lap> Re: XML, namespaces, extensibility and validation Mark Nottingham (Wednesday, 5 September)

<DanC_lap> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007Sep/0012.html

DC: One possibility is to prototype a new validator that can do new elements in a namespace using XSD
... There's a little mail there; I'll continue to work on the action.

SW: New due date?

DC: Check in a week.

<scribe> ACTION: Dan Connolly to Work with Olivier and Tim to draft a position regarding extensibility of HTML and the role of the validator for consideration by the TAG ACTION-7 [CONTINUES] [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action09]

<DanC_lap> (ideally, trackbot-ng would track the date of our next meeting, and "ACTION-7 continues" by default would set the due date to the date of the next meeting)

SW: ACTION-44 was on Dave; but Dave's not here.
... What about the Tag Soup Integration topic list

<Stuart> http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/tag-soup-integration

Raman: We said we'd use it as a scratch pad to write down the ideas and issues that we have for discussion; it's not something I imagined that we'd publish.

SW: In terms of discussion today, is it a good guide?

Raman: Seems fine to me.

DC: I'd like to pick #3: XML or HTML serialization from View Source
... Should new authors learn to put "/" in their br tags?

NW: YES!

DC: Do you have any arguments I could use to convince others?

Raman: The argument against using balanced tags and XML empty elements is about ease of authoring; but I don't think it works in the long run.

(DID THE SCRIBE GET THAT RIGHT?)

<DanC_lap> (yes, I agree it's more straightforward to teach HTML as XML; that's what I hear from educators.)

Scribe attempts to participate and fails to scribe or participate effectively

Raman: Because I have a parser that accepts some gunk, to use that as an excuse to encourage authors to write more gunk is bad

DC: That's not their argument, their argument is that it's easier to teach HTML.

Raman: Well, I don't believe that, but it's just a matter of opinion.
... Time will tell.

DC: One task I'm looking for is someone to write a tutorial on how to write an HTML document.

Raman: That's going to vary depending on the biases of who you ask.
... You can't claim that I didn't write HTML because I balanced my tags.

DC: I guess some harm could be done, but at this point I'd like anything. I've got 43 authors interested and no one delivering.

SW: What about the authoring communities out there?

<Zakim> Rhys, you wanted to say isn't ambiguity an issue for poorly written HTML?

DC: There are lots of them, but I can't get them to participate in the working group.

RL: Apart from the religious differences about which is easier, isn't there ambiguity in the tag soup case?

DC: The working hypothesis is that most of the ambiguity has gone away because the browsers have reverse engineered a lot of it.

SW: Ian Hickson has written about the difference between the DOMs constructed which plays into the scripting problem.

DC: For 90% of the web, you can just use the html5lib code and it works.

Some wandering discussion of or respective recollections of history

<Rhys> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel

<Rhys> Appears in http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793

<Rhys> Interesting that the RFC quotes it as "TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be

<Rhys> conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from

<Rhys> others."

<DanC_lap> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postel%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_Principle )

Raman: Attribute quoting is not the problem.
... If unquoted attributes were the only thing we had to open up to have clean markup, I'd accept that compromise today.
... it's far far worse.

SW: Worse how?

Raman: The way scripting is bound to HTML is just not well defined.
... Scripts that write HTML that includes scripts do this by writing partial tags and other things that no computer scientest would ever have accepted.
... They didn't have a tree and now they need one

DC: There are applications where you'd think that was out of scope
... Link searching, for example

Raman/HT: No, that just doesn't work. Many, many links are constructed by script.

Raman: There are things that people need to see and things that machines need to see. Lots of things are hidden behind scripting. Mostly for Google, people make sure the stuff they want indexed isn't hidden.

DO: This reminds me of the issues we discovered in the State finding about URIs hidden in cookies.

Raman: Cookies are the next level, that's state management. There's two layers: the shallow web and the deep web.
... Over time, as the stuff not indexed by today's methods grows, something will have to change.

SW: Dan, you started us down this route with a question about teaching HTML. Is there any conclusion?

DC: I'm slightly more depressed than when we started; I learned a few things.

Thanks to the host

<Rhys> RESOLVED: thanks to Susan Davies for the organisation of this face to face meeting.

Summary of Action Items

[NEW] ACTION: Dan to investigate the feasibility of having a Movable Type blog at /blog/tag [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action06]
[NEW] ACTION: David and Dan work together to articulate the versioning story that the TAG wants to tell. [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action08]
[NEW] ACTION: HenryS to fix .htaccess in 2007/09 so that .owl files get the right mime type [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action04]
[NEW] ACTION: Norm to produce a new draft of the namespace documents finding based on 18 Sep discussion (@@trackbot got it?) [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action05]
[NEW] ACTION: Rhys to investigate two AJAX libraries and see how well they support exposing URIs for intermediate results. [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action07]
 
[PENDING] ACTION: Dan Connolly to Work with Olivier and Tim to draft a position regarding extensibility of HTML and the role of the validator for consideration by the TAG ACTION-7 [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action09]
[PENDING] ACTION: Henry S. Thompson to Henry to prepare new draft of xmlFunctions-34 ACTION-26 [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action03]
[PENDING] ACTION: Henry S. Thompson to revise URNsAndRegistries-50 finding in response to F2F discussion [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action02]
 
[DONE] ACTION: David Orchard to explore the space of external registries and to post to the tag member list. ACTION-32 [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2007/09/18-tagmem-minutes.html#action01]
 
[End of minutes]

Minutes formatted by David Booth's scribe.perl version 1.127 (CVS log)
$Date: 2007/09/21 22:19:38 $