The first public draft of sXBL, the SVG subset of XBL, has been
published.  This draft is http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-sXBL-20040901/
and the URL for the current version of sXBL is http://www.w3.org/TR/sXBL .

This draft does not contain all of the features in Mozilla's XBL, and it
is incompatible with Mozilla's XBL implementation in a number of ways.
Some ways are obvious, such as tag names changing, but some ways are
less obvious.  (The big ones that I have concerns about are (1) the
effect of xml-stylesheet PIs in the binding document (they apply to the
content, even though I always thought of them as applying to the
presentation of the document rather than the content), and (2) the
requirement that the shadow tree nodes have their ownerDocument pointing
back to the binding document, which requires the binding document to
have a fully fledged DOM.)  But there are some parts of XBL, such as
event handling, that I know very little about.

I'd particularly like to point out the following parts of the "Status of
this Document" section:

(1)

  The refactoring of RCC into sXBL was partly the result of coordination
  efforts within the W3C across working groups (particularly the SVG and
  CSS working groups) to ensure that RCC/sXBL was forward-looking and
  could develop into a future modularly-defined and general-purpose XBL
  specification which met the needs of multiple XML markup languages,
  not just SVG.

This says that more features are expected to be added for a full-fledged
XBL spec that would come later.  However, such a spec would be
constrained by whatever is defined in the sXBL spec, even though sXBL
doesn't meet all the requirements for using XBL in languages other than
SVG.  So it's definitely worth commenting on problems in this spec, even
though it's not complete.

(2)

  We explicitly invite comments on this specification. Please send them
  to [EMAIL PROTECTED], the public e-mail list for issues related to vector
  graphics on the Web.

and (3)

  The XBL task force considers the sXBL specification nearly ready for
  Last Call. After evaluating public feedback on this draft, the next
  public draft might be a Last Call working draft.


I think it would be useful for those involved with or knowledgable about
Mozilla's XBL to provide feedback (per (2) above) about this
specification.  It's also worth discussing, perhaps on these newsgroups,
how Mozilla should move forward given this specification.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >

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