Abut the e-mails, sure, i will follow your blog and will think in how to expose things better and also thing of more specific case of use you can work with.

From what I understand from above you are asking for (1) a widget render context (window) to be able to dynamically grow its width and height? And (2) some kind of base color palette?

In case I’ve understood 1 correctly, this should already be allowed by the spec. In the case of 2, every device displays color differently and I’m not sure that having a color palette would be much help to creating widgets that blend well with their surroundings.

Mobile phone screens are able to display more and more colors every year (eg. the iPhone)
For example, most modern phones can reproduce 65,000, LG’s Prada can do 256,000 colors, and Nokia’s N95 can reproduce 16.7 million colors, i think. The DPI of screens is also rapidly increasing (eg. iPhone’s 160 dpi), which poses further problems for developers. The w3c has quite a few activities looking at how to overcome these problems, particularly the the Ubiquitous and Mobile Web initiatives and the Device Independence Working Group and CSS Working Group.

Also, color theory states that colors appear as they do because of the colors they have next to them. So people could mix whatever palette you give them and still create a design that does not work well (especially if you can control what color sits next to the widget).

Regarding time frame: the iPhone brought a bit of seismic shift to mobile widgets, and so has the rapid emergence of the mobile widgets market over the last 6 months. We are investigating the mobility issues right now. However, we hope to have this all wrapped up by sometime in between 2008-2009.

Now, what i mean for minimum customization requirements, don`t really has to do with the design and the proper aesthetic of the widgers per se, what i mean is having a minimum set of options for the widgets,and can be very much resumed to 2 simple things:

Broad Adjustable size and Color palette.

And those are for the simple reason that, with those 2 things as a standard, it would be very easy to make a widget Blend with anything.

But, i will edit the post to clarify what i meant with that part.

Once again, thanks for stopping by.

P.S:, when do you think the Final draft will be done?, i was right with “this year” ?

If you mean that we should specify a base look and feel for widgets, then I’m not sure if that is such a good idea. Firstly, widget vendors already provide aesthetic guidelines for widgets that developers should follow, and each vendor has it’s on set of requirements (see in particular apple’s, microsoft’s, and Yahoo!’s guidelines for widget development). Also, aesthetic models continuously change and new ones emerge (eg. the new iPhone aesthetic). I don’t think it should be the w3c’s place to tell designers or widget vendors what widgets should look like, but, instead, instead, the w3c should specify the tools developers need to create awesome looking/functioning widgets.