Statement of Interest

Below is a short statement of interest I offer as a starter. I am looking for feedback, edits, etc. (Mike Amundsen)

I am interested in a set of affordance definitions for the XML format designed to effectively and efficiently express protocol-level state transitions within responses. Examples of ther possible operations I have in mind are:

• follow this link (i.e. HTML.A)
• embed the content at this link in the current document (i.e. XInclude)
• format a query string URL using the following arguments and send the request to the server (i.e. URI-Templates)
• format a body using the following arguments and send it to the server (i.e. HTML.FORM@method="post")

I am esp. interested in a set of affordance definitions that are "domain-agnostic", IOW ones that are not tied to a single problem domain (accounting, document management, etc.) since this could allow/encourage the creation of standard libraries (similar to other XML-related technologies (XSLT, XSD, XInclude, etc.) that can then be applied to a wide range of server and client implementations and problem domains.

I suggest, as a reference, using the H-Factors as a guide/jumping off point in selecting and designing affordances for XML that provide the agreed-upon level of link and state-transition semantics.