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I'm just leaving Sao Paulo after attending the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. Great conference (people and technical content). I'd like to say more about a number of the other papers, but I'll focus here on the one that won this year's Best Paper Award: Enabling Adaptive Time-based Web Applications with SMIL State by Jack Jansen and Dick Bulterman.

The paper presents a very interesting mix of SMIL, XForms and other technologies to enable end-users to customize their experience of content where time dictates the major structure. One example given is of a video bike tour of Amsterdam created by the first author. Fragments of the video content can be identified and tagged with keywords. During run-time, an XForm is used to allow an end-user to select from the available keywords those which they find interesting, and the corresponding fragments of video are played.

This is the type of thinking that will clearly help make video content a first class citizen on the web. There is significant potential for the use of this technology for stream-lining educative experiences as well. Imagine, for example, a 2-hour audiovisual presentation that provides a thorough introduction to a topic, say CSS. But suppose the end-user really needs to know only about setting up borders on tables. By selecting the content, the user can find out what they need to know in 10 minutes. What's more, it is easy to imagine how the technology reported by Jansen and Bulterman could be refined to attenuate the video content download to the selected fragments.

A second example reported in [1] pertains to ad selection within video content. When you download free video for your favorite entertainment, you're going to get ads and you won't have the ability to skip them because otherwise how do people manage to make a living providing you with this free entertainment?? So, sprinkled through the video will be ad slots with default advertisements lined up. But, in addition there will be hotspots on the video where various product icons may appears from time to time, and if the user clicks the icon, then the default ad is replaced with an ad corresponding to the clicked icon. Thus, you could find out what's new at the electronics shop in lieu of an ad for laundry soap or some such.

It's a great example on the technical side of the need for interactive video, but this is because there's huge market potential for this idea. Not only does the user get a more pleasant ad experience with their free content, but the content provider gets to find out what their audience is most interested in, and the advertisers get to find out what content their customers are most interested in. Very Web 2.0.

I encourage you to download and read the paper.

At the specification level, the W3C Forms working group is working on modularization of XForms as one means of promoting incremental adoption. This is following the simple business axiom that "embrace and extend" is economically preferable to "rip and replace". If you have existing web applications, and you want to start incorporating selected features of XForms to get at certain benefits, it helps to be able to get at just those features without having to change your entire application over to XForms in one development cycle. Modularization supports agile development.

The Forms working group is now also working on XForms 1.2, even as XForms 1.1 continues toward full W3C Recommendation status. In XForms 1.2, the second approach the Forms working group is using to promote incremental adoption is to stream-line web application authoring through emphasis on attribute decoration and exploitation of UI element nesting as a means of expressing the simpler classes of MVC applications. The attributes are attached directly to UI elements, but they imply a proper XForms MVC architecture. In other words, the XForms processor can read the attributes and auto-generate a proper model for you. To get an idea of what the stream-lined vocabulary might look like, and what canonical XForms it might correspond to, look here.

The approach of providing stream-lined syntax is simpatico with modularization for two reasons. First, it means we can provide the stream-lined vocabulary and processing model as a module separately from modules that provide the components of the core XForms engine (e.g. the instance data module, the submission module, and so forth). Second, the stream-lined syntax approach means that authors can start with attribute decoration and UI nesting, and then scale up in more complex functional areas as the need arises by adopting the core XForms modules appropriate to the problem at hand.

The stream-lined syntax approach is also interesting because techniques such as attribute decoration, UI nesting, and progressive elaboration of a document are techniques familiar to AJAX developers and made popular by AJAX libraries such as Dojo. In fact, I am really coming to the conclusion that AJAX libraries are a viable alternative to browser-maker adoption as a means of delivering the most web-centric components of the W3C technology stack. It should not be necessary for Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and other browser makers to build a W3C technology into their browsers before it becomes widely adopted and deployed. More importantly, this means that the W3C, not the browser makers, defines the web and its standards.

The XForms team finished our face-to-face meeting in Amsterdam last week. A major focus of the work on XForms 1.2 is called modularization.

The rationale for this work is the observation that the set of XML data processing problems which may have first arisen in the electronic form space are really more generally applicable to the XML data processing needs of RIAs and web applications. On the other hand, those who hear the word "form" may think they do not have a form problem because they still think of a "form" as a simple or static application like those for ordering pizza or flowers. However, XForms has solved numerous problems that keep coming up again and again throughout the W3C standards stack as well as the web application stack. By modularizing the components of XForms, we believe we can increase adoption of the components in other technologies which may not have need of all aspects of XForms.

The current view of the XForms 1.2 modularization can be viewed here. As an example of the rationale above, consider an application that may want to use the submission capability from XForms in a regular web application. The application would import the instance data module, but it might have an application-specific way of populating a data instance with data. The submission module would reference a data instance for the upload data and another instance for the submission results. An application-specific method would then be invoked to consume the submission result into the application, but the means of invoking that method could be an event handler for the xforms-submit-done event. The key issue here is that submission could be consumed by a non-XForms application without needing to incorporate the XForms recalculation engine, user interface controls and so forth.

The full elaboration of this modularization will allow applications to consume pieces of XForms incrementally, including the notion of data validation, data relevance, declarative data calculations, event-drive action scripting, repeats, switches, groups, basic user interface controls, and of course submissions.

Within IBM, there is an "Extreme Blue for Employees" program called Biztech, which promotes innovative development within IBM by funding special projects developed by teams that can come from all across IBM. Today, the 6th Biztech Showcase is being held at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab, Yorktown. It consists of 12 projects including ours.

Our project, which will be presented this afternoon, is called Dual Forms. To understand the basic business problem, suppose you have a complex office document such as a contract, a patent filing or a new supplier agreement. It will have many sections to fill out, some with precise information like names, supply codes, dates, milestones, deadlines, and payment amounts. These are things that need to be validated in order to prevent errors, or which may need to match with data stored elsewhere. However, other parts of the document will contain free flowing text, such as special terms and conditions. The document may also contain pie charts, bar graphs, or other rich content that serves as visual aids. The key here is that the document is complicated and hard to complete, which frustrates those who must collaborate to complete and results in costly delays in completion.

Now imagine you had a technology that could augment the office document completion experience with:

• wizard behaviors that take the user step-by-step through the fill process and help correct errors immediately
• automatically invoke web services of an SOA to obtain data during the fill experience, rather than making the user responsible to type in matching data.
• digital signature security so that the legally binding agreement can be made electronically rather than having to print, sign, fax, scan and store document images.
• automatic submission of completed documents to the back-end workflow system or the repository of executed legal agreements.

This is the domain of Dual Forms. The Lotus Forms technology provides the above benefits as well as the ability to enclose any other files within a Lotus Form. One such enclosure can be an ODF office document. Lotus Symphony is an implementation that runs under the Lotus Notes application platform as well as the underlying Lotus Expeditor application platform. In this project, we've created a Lotus Notes composite application that allows the Lotus Forms Viewer to run under Notes, including read/write access to the running form. The composite application also hosts the Lotus Symphony ODF editors at the same time.

Using this project, the end-user can get access within a single application to the capabilities of office documents AND the capabilities of Lotus Forms (wizards, help, web services, signatures, document submission to the business process). The underlying technology that allows the two rich document formats to interoperate is... XForms.