Subject: [REMOTEUI] WG Review: Widget Description Exchange Service (widex)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2005 09:49:55 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area. The IESG has not 
made any determination as yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is 
provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing 
list ([email-masked]) by October 12.

+++

Widget Description Exchange Service (widex)
-------------------------------------------

Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Chair(s):
TBD

Applications Area Director(s):
Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Scott Hollenbeck <[email-masked]>

Applications Area Advisor:
Scott Hollenbeck <[email-masked]>

Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: [email-masked]
To Subscribe: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/remoteui
Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/remoteui/index.html
Suplemental Website: http://www.softarmor.com/rui

Description of Working Group:

With the Internet reaching out to more and more devices, people are
increasingly expecting to have access to services at anytime, from anywhere
and using any device. Such services are being developed using Web
technologies such as XML and distributed across the network rather than
resident on any one device.

An example is a service to access flight arrival times, where the user
interface expressed in XHTML is rendered on a client device, the application
logic runs on a remote server and a technique as user interface remoting is
used to keep the user interface synchronized with the application logic.
What is currently lacking is a convenient means for continous fine grained
synchronization rather than the one provided by a request/response protocol
(e.g. HTTP) for Web pages, which occurs in between page loads. This would
allow the user interface to reflect changes in application state and offer
greater flexibility for applications to respond to user input events.

The WiDeX (Widget Description Exchange Service) Working Group seeks to
define a light weight mechanism used in an IP-based network for remoting
user interfaces where the user interface is represented in XML, and
synchronization involves XML DOM events and XML DOM mutation/update
operations.

The WG will strive to preserve an extensible architecture so that the work
possibly be useful in the future with other types of descriptive user
interfaces beyond those specifically considered by the group.

Specific topics that are NOT goals of this WG are:

- XML representation of user interface objects.
- Means to establish sessions and support for device coordination.

The WiDeX service definition will define:

- A mechanism for synchronizing distributed XML DOM objects by propagating
DOM mutations/updates and DOM events.
- A set of parameters that need to be negotiated by a service discovery and
session setup mechanism in order to start the UI remoting session.
- A framework that enables a mechanism for remoting user interfaces
represented in XML format by using distributed XML DOM synchronization, and
a service discovery and session setup mechanism as building blocks.

Deliverables:

- Requirements document.
- Document specifying the framework for remoting user interfaces represented
in XML format.
- Document specifying the message formats for XML DOM events and updates
using XML in a way that is independent of the transport protocol.
- Document(s) specifying normative binding(s) to at least one transport
protocol.

It is possible that work undertaken in other working groups and even other
standards bodies (e.g. W3C) will be referenced by this working group. It is
even possible that entire deliverables could be satisfied by the work of
other working groups (e.g. discovery protocols). This working group will
seek to maximize the use of existing specifications where applicable.

Goals and Milestones:

Nov. 2005 IETF 64, Charter Working Group
Feb. 2006 Working Group Last Call on Requirements draft
March 2006 IETF 65, Discuss Last Call comments on Requirements draft
April 2006 Submit Requirements draft to IESG for publication as
Informational RFC
June 2006 Working Group Last Call on Framework, Message Formats and
Transport Bindings drafts
Aug. 2006 IETF 66, Discuss Last Call comments on Framework, Message
Formats and Transport Bindings drafts
Nov. 2006 IETF 67, Submit Framework, Message Formats and Transport
Bindings drafts for publication as Proposed Standard

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---

From: Joe Gregorio <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 12:05:35 -0400

> Widget Description Exchange Service (widex)

This work seems to have substantial overlap with the current work
of the WHATWG. In particular the work on Web Applications 1.0:

  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#communication

  Thanks,
  -joe

--
Joe Gregorio        http://bitworking.org