Groups - OASIS TC teleconference modified

[jhelms@harmonia.com]

OASIS TC teleconference has been modified by James Helms (jhelms@harmonia.com).

Date:  Monday, 15 November 2004
Time:  12:00pm - 01:00pm Eastern Time

Event Description:


Agenda:


Minutes:
OASIS 
User Interface Markup Language (UIML)
Technical Committee (TC)

Minutes 

Logistics 
Meeting Date	November 15, 2004
Meeting Time	12:00 PM EST
Location	Meeting held via Teleconference hosted by Harmonia, Inc.
Duration	1 Hour
Chair	Marc Abrams
Recording Secretary	Jim Helms

Attending
Name	Organization
Jim Helms	Harmonia, Inc.
Robbie Schaefer	Paderborn University
Wayne Paesch	PMA-282 NSWCDD
Mir Farooq Ali	Virginia Tech
Kris Luyten	Limburgs Universitair Centrum

Business In Order

	Discussion of Property Ordering 

	One issue that Harmonia has encountered in creating UIML renderers is that the order properties are processed matters in determining how the final UI will look.  For example, if we wish to set the carat position on a Text Field, we must first set the Text.  Jim Helms queried the committee on the appropriateness of a language solution to this problem.

Kris Luyten recommended against adding an explicit ordering mechanism to the UIML language, as it would detract from the declarative nature of UIML.  Kris had similar issues when he implemented his .NET renderer and solved the issue through ad hoc, special case code.  While he believes that such a solution is not ideal, including an explicit ordering in the language is even less attractive.  The committee agreed to edit the UIML specification so that it explicitly states the way properties should be processed by renderers, specifically that they will be processed sequentially as they appear in the file.

A related problem to property ordering is that of pre-child and post-child processing.  Certain properties only make sense when processed before or after it’s corresponding part’s children have been rendered.  For example, when rendering to Java Swing, the JTabbedPane constructs itself based on the number of children it has, with each child becoming a separate tab.  Thus if one wants to set an initially selected tab, the selectedTab property must be set after the children are rendered.  In contrast, layouts must be applied to containers before the children are processed to ensure that they are arranged correctly.

The TC agreed that a new attribute should be added to the d-property element of UIML to indicate whether the property should be applied before or after the children of the current part are rendered.

	DISL Discussion

	Robbie Schaefer led a discussion of DISL, a dialog specification and user interface modeling language that grew out of UIML.  Over the course of the month since the October meeting, TC members had sent Robbie a number of questions regarding DISL and it’s relation to other languages, multimodal interfaces, etc.  Robbie prepared a slide presentation that addresses each of the questions posed.  The presentation is attached to these minutes.

	Action Items

	·	Jim Helms will update the Open Issues document to add the lessons learned from investigating DISL.
·	Jim Helms will update the document recording the relationship of UIML to other languages/ working groups to include XAML
·	Each member of the TC will send between 5 and 10 short questions about USIXML to Jean Vanderdonckt so that he may prepare some material for the USIXML discussion at the next meeting.  These questions should be sent no later than the Wednesday before the meeting.

 	Adjournment
 	
The meeting ended at 1:00 PM EST to reconvene on December 20th, 2004.
This event is one in a list of recurring events.
Other event dates in this series:

Monday, 16 August 2004, 12:00pm to 01:00pm Eastern Time
Monday, 20 September 2004, 12:00pm to 01:00pm Eastern Time
Monday, 18 October 2004, 12:00pm to 01:00pm Eastern Time
Monday, 20 December 2004, 12:00pm to 01:00pm Eastern Time

View event details:
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/uiml/event.php?event_id=5823

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Referenced Items
Date            Name                             Type
----            ----                             ----
16 Nov 2004     minutes 2004-11-15 UIML.pdf      Reference Document
16 Nov 2004     2004-11-15_DISLQA.pdf            Reference Document
16 Nov 2004     2004-11-15_DISLQA.ppt            Reference Document