Minutes of 5 April Telcon

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

Minutes of first TREX telcon held at 10.30 EDT Thursday 5th April

Present

James Clark
Don Smith
Murata Makoto
Mike Smith
Josh Lubell
Karl Best (observer)
Eric van der Vlist 
Mike Fitzgerald
Fabio Arciniegas
James Tauber
Norm Walsh

Decisions

The following decisions were made (all unanimous).

1. Change the charter of the group to make its objective the creation
of a unified schema language based on TREX and RELAX.

2. Resolve the issue "Should empty elements allow whitespace?": elements
with no declared children should allow whitespace.

3. Resolve the issue of "Parameterized patterns": not to be added in
the first version.

4. Resolve the issue of "Drop concur": drop the "concur" element.

Discussion

JJC reported that he had met with Murata-san (the designer of RELAX)
to discuss unification of TREX and RELAX, and that their conclusion
was that they felt it was probably possible to arrive at a design that
was satifactory to both.  There was a general feeling that unification
was politically desirable.  It was unanimously decided to change the
charter of the TC to make the objective be the development of a
unified language.
 
On the "Should empty elements allow whitespace?" issue, the decision
as taken that empty elements (ie elements not declared to have any
children) should allow whitespace.

On the "difference" issue, there was some sentiment for change, but
the right choice of name was not clear: "except" was one possibility
that was mentioned.

On the "xml:base" issue, any decision was postponed until xml:base
gets REC status.

On the "Add pattern to match any element?", the concern was whether
this was important enough to be worth a special syntactic
abbreviation. No conclusion was reached.

On the "Syntax of global attribute on attribute element", there was
some sentiment for change, but no conclusion on a new syntax.

On the "Split include element?" issue, most people felt it was
desirable to split, if a good pair of replacement names could be
found.

On the "Name of grammar element" issue, most people felt that the
current name was satisfactory, but Murata-san expressed concern over
the conflict with the grammar element in RELAX namespaces.  The TC
will look at RELAX namespaces and see whether there is an alternative
to "grammar" that would be more appropriate there.

On "Parameterized patterns", the feeling was that this was on the
wrong side of the 80/20 divide for the first version, and the decision
was taken not to include them in the first version.

On versioning, there were arguments for and against both a namespace
URI and a version attribute on the document element.  No conclusion
was reached.

On the "Drop concur" issue, the decision was taken to drop the concur
element.

The next telcon will take place in two weeks at the same time.

James
TREX