Present Mike Beckerle Martin Westhead Geoff Judd Bob McGrath Discussion This was a very useful discussion. We started by formulating the outline of the spec document and then reviewed some specific aspects of the new format document. Spec document outline: Introduction section * glossary * What is DFLD? * Model Language basics * syntax * scoping and context * guards and selectors on annotations * basic arrays * variables * layering (hidden layers and value calc/referencing) Detailed semantics * properties and conversions Arrays Built-in specifications Extensions Extensibility - constructs like <dfdl:sequence> need to have their list of allowed properties extensible Format/defineFormat - is the dfdl:format tag correctly named. Martin assumed a catch-all dfdl annotation tag. Mike assumed that dfdl:format was *just* format and that other things (variable assignments, conversion definitions etc.) would go in different tags. More examples and investigation are required to see how this works in practice. defineFormat is probably too specific right now, this is an important reuse mechanism and it should be available to apply to all top level dfdl tags. One solution would be to have a more generic "define" tag that can contain "dfdl:format" tags along with others. Properties and variables - we expect that properties and variables have the same scoping, assignment and reference semantics. Properties are only different in the sense that they represent parameters to conversions. Linked properties - we discussed the need for linked properties, it seems like extra stuff that might not be required and it was useful to see if there were different ways to achieve the same goal. From the discussion it did not seem an unreasonable thing to include. Applies default - we reviewed the issues around the "applies" default (toScope or hereOnly) the current default is "hereOnly" different examples suggest different defaults are more appropriate. We decided to leave the decision where it was but a bigger selection of examples will probably help inform this decision. Actions * Assemble draft of spec document from the pieces that we have. (Currently unassigned - volunteers?)