[whatwg] Suggested changes to Web Forms 2.0, 2004-07-01 working

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 07:54:02 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> It is the concensus of the members.
> 
> How was this consensus reached?

Over a beer in a San Jose bar, if I'm not mistaken.


> Could you at least perhaps mention some of the other approaches 
> considered for IE support and why they were rejected?

Binary plugin: rejected because it is the members' opinion that binary 
plugins would not be successful in this field without being shipped by 
default by Microsoft. (Evidence: formsPlayer, Adobe's SVG plugin, Flash 
player being successful due to being shipped by default.)

Pure Javascript solution: not rejected.

HTC solution: not rejected. Preferred due to its various self-contained 
aspects as described by Dean in an earlier mail.


> As I've said before, I do not feel HTC's are an appropriate mechanism 
> for providing this sort of support in a release environment.

Nobody is forcing you to use HTCs. :-) Just don't stop anyone else from 
using them.


> > > How are these oninvalid events dealt with in legacy FireFox, Opera, 
> > > Safari, Konqueror etc. ?
> > 
> > By not doing them at all. Legacy UAs are expected to not support WF2, 
> > and thus WF2 degrades into current "stupid" HTML in those UAs. (This 
> > is also a requirement. It has to degrade gracefully.)
> 
> So it's the expectation of the WHAT-WG that users of Mozilla, Safari and 
> Opera will get a severely degraded experience unless they upgrade their 
> browsers?  Well as I said before - it's one way to drive Opera sales.

Oddly enough, Opera, Mozilla and Apple do not think it is unusual for them 
to add new features to their products and hope that existing users of 
previous version of those products upgrade to the new releases. In fact, 
when we researched this, we discovered it was standard industry practice, 
and a good way to stay in business.

We wouldn't really have to worry about back-compat at all if it wasn't for 
Microsoft stalling IE development, since if it wasn't for Windows IE 
there's a good chance we'd all be writing XHTML by now, meaning that 
instead of extending HTML4, we could be working with standards such as 
SVG, XForms, RDF, and the like.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'