WSRP-Markup 1.1 Proposals

Hi Everyone,

Whatever the reasons may be, we have not had much response to the Markup SC calls for examples of CSS classes from member companies implementing WSRP, nor for Markup-specific issues. Over the course of setting up and conducting our work, our ambitious initial plans were successively constrained from a too-broad exploration of markup technologies to a more focused look at what was needed for v1.1. However, even that has proved to be finding less and less that was actually required. Because our first few months of work resulted in recommendations that were adopted in v1.0, and we have not heard about ANY difficulties which would lead us to recommend additions, deletions, refinements or corrections, there is only one remaining CSS class that we have agreed is a good idea, but for which that we did not receive further information about experimental implementations. Tabs is the class.

So, I have written a proposed addition to the spec for tabs simply as a point of departure. It is based on Mozilla's XUL box system because Intenet Explorer does not yet support tabs and the scuttlebut is that it will be "integrated" as XAML within "Longhorn." Looking at a fair sample of the burgeoning portlet libraries from our member companies, IBM, Oracle, Sun, SAP, BEA, Novell and Plumtree, I think we can say that Tabs are very likely to be supported as soon as feasible, due to its added functionality and space/time saving on a web page.

It is just a logical option for the presentation of closely related portlets within a group, such as the top five stocks in an individual investor's stock quote portlet. So, there seems to be no reason not to allow it now. There are any number of workarounds that can be implemented to produce similar results for Internet Explorer. A simple search on "CSS Tabs" will produce a number of these workarounds.

We are also presenting a proposal for including VXML 2.0, thanks to Walter Haenel. VXML 2.0 is nearing adoption by W3C as a Recommendation. We are working to put our TC chair into contact with the W3C VXML WG chairs, as suggested by our contact in that WG.

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