Document Architecture Open Issues

• Project management issue: how to make triage decisions, prioritize
• Detailed block taxonomy: ID all block types, strawman syntax for content-spec
  • Are menus, dialogs, and splitter windows separate blocks?
  • John and Andy to come up with lists and compare them
  • Block attributes:
    • Is "containment" an attribute of all blocks or are only special blocks "containers"? If not all blocks are containers, how is annotation done?
    • Do all blocks have controllers?
• How exactly do renderers work?
• How do we cope with the tension of device-independent attributes and non-device-independent attributes. PDAs maybe don't have a toolbar, how do you add to a toolbar?
• Issues related to queries:
  • Need "hello, world" query -- sequential (non-indexed) query implemented but not exposed
  • How do you notify blocks with queries when an item in the result list disappears?
  • Do we allow blocks to hold user-specified Items that don't match a query? (For example, if Joe sends you email from his wife's account, you'd like to be able to add that message to the "messages from Joe" 'folder', even when that 'folder' is actually a query "all messages from Joe".)
• Detailed design of Table Widget and Outline Widget: interaction design with screenshots, maybe on whiteboard, maybe with Mimi
• Event design
• UI of recognizers: quick-and-dirty prototype good to do
• Phrases
  • Phrase construction: What element controls the phrase construction? For example, does a table specify what phrases it wants for its Items? Or do the Items specify what phrases describe it? If Items and blocks both specify the phrase construction, how will the override be handled? Are there special Phrase Blocks that are separate from Phrases? If so, what's special about a Phrase Block?
  • Phrase sorting: How are Phrases sorted (e.g. in a table)? Presumably, if you've got elements like "From Ducky re: unit 47 at 9:03 AM", you'd like to be able to sort those elements by the date. However, if you have mixed Item types, it might not make sense to sort by date. Lexical sorting would certainly be easier.
• Resource location: there are lots of little pieces of data -- strings, images, preferences -- that a document uses. Where do those resources live such that they can easily be manipulated (e.g. localized)? (@@@ Wouldn't they live in the Repository like everything else?)
• What are Form blocks? One could imagine "Attribute blocks" that allows setting one attribute, and that Form blocks would be made up of a lot of little attribute blocks. It might be better to have Forms not be containers, but to hold all the Attributes itself and figure out how to lay them out.
• How do you deal with the contention that could arise if there are two displays of the same block?
• Where do user-generated code fragments associated with blocks live?
• APIs for blocks (need implementation first)
• UI for recognizers
• ACL/sharing policies for blocks: what happens if a block isn't available? How is it displayed -- greeked? Does this unavailable block participate in events? Documents have permissions but not blocks; individual data elements have permissions. Items that you don't have access to just don't show up. One idea: maybe a sharing policy is an executable piece of code: allows sharing policies to be arbitrarily complex. Maybe sharing policies are implemented with queries: if an item satisfies a query, then it's okay. More discussion with the data model group needed. Minimum needed: owner/group/nobody access.
• How do time-aware blocks work? How do you constrain the Item properties when necessary? Is it the same class of block for different time periods -- is month view different from workweek view? Is thumbnail different?
• We need more clarity on format and style.

• At some point, need to make a presentation to the whole team; a Document and some screenshots would be good.

-- DuckySherwood - 11 Sep 2003