W3C

– DRAFT –
XForms Group Weekly Teleconference

06 March 2026

Attendees

Present
Alain, Erik, Steven
Regrets
-
Chair
Steven
Scribe
Steven

Meeting minutes

Inserting nodes

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xformsusers/2026Feb/0008

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xformsusers/2026Feb/att-0008/insert-table.html

Steven: [explains the email]

Steven: Erik you were proposing document to document replacing being allowed

Erik: I haven't thought deeply about it though.

Erik: An XML document is a tree with attributes and special case of document node, and you insert into others or next to others.
… in general siblings but not always.

Steven: It seems to be about "what does the user intend?"

Erik: A replace action should be possible.
… replacing is done by delete and then insert.

Steven: I think we should be allowed to insert an attribute into an element, otherwise it is difficult to do
… especially since we now say that it is disallowed, you have to select the attribute list of a node

<ebruchez> https://www.w3.org/community/xformsusers/wiki/XForms_2.0#data-mutations

Erik: Patterns for data mutations

Steven: Why use context for setting attributes?

Erik: @context means "into". Ref creates siblings.

Steven: attributes are in a separate list from the children

Alain: I was looking at XQuery, and they have replace, replace value, and rename

Steven: Can I insert text into a document node?

Alain: Only whitespace

Steven: Is it useful then?

Erik: If you want to create any XML document, then yes.

Steven: So allow text and check that it is whitespace?

Alain: Yes

Steven: And inserting text as a sibling of the root element has also to be checked as whitespace

Alain: Yes

Alain: For DOM there used to be a text node for attributes, but not with DOM3

Steven: To insert an attribute, must you always use context?
… I would expect <insert ref="elem" origin="../blank/@attr"/> to work, and not sure what blocks it

Erik: I would like a single way of doing it
… maybe having multiple verbs and actions in XQuery is the better approach

<ebruchez> https://www.xmlmind.com/tutorials/XQueryUpdate/index.html

Steven: My example above seems very obvious
… in intent

Steven: How about if we add to @position, an "into"

Steven: I will work on this further, and come with some proposals.

Steven: If you say <insert context="parent" ref="element" origin="somelist\/element"/>

?.. does it matter that the list, empty at first, becomes non-empty for subsequent nodes in the list.

Erik: I think ref is evaluated once

Alain: Agree

Steven: That's good

AOB

Steven: The ixml symposium was good. Videos will be posted.
… next meeting next week, an hour earlier in Europe.

[ADJOURN]

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 248 (Mon Oct 27 20:04:16 2025 UTC).

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No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: Steven

All speakers: Alain, Erik, Steven

Active on IRC: ebruchez, Steven