Call four comments 4 is out (Was: [whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 submission to W3C)

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> > 
> > We'll be publishing another call for comments that takes into account 
> > the technical comments that W3C staff sent to us privately as very 
> > soon.
> 
> I saw a call for comments has already been published but not yet 
> announced. Is that made so people can view the diff for the changes that 
> are made not discussed through this mailing list?

Nah, it was because I was having issues with generating the diffs. If 
anyone has a decent HTML diffing tool, I'm still in the market for one. 
Contact me off list.

Anyway, yes, as Anne has noticed, the fourth call for comments is out:

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/2005-04-11-call-for-comments/

Unless we receive substantial comments pointing out problems in the spec, 
the plan is to go to a call for implementations in a few weeks.


> Also it seems the W3C has a lot of demands that could slow down the 
> process. Will the call for implementations draft be even more postponed 
> or is it still underway?

There are basically five suggestions in the team comment:

1. Splitting the features that work in old UAs from those that don't into 
   two specs, WF2 and WF3. As far as I can tell, we've already done this.
   The features that work in old UAs are those in HTML4, which we are
   calling "WF1", and the new features or features that require updates to
   user agents or that would have to be implemented in script to work in 
   old user agents are in WF2.

   To be honest I'm not sure if I accurately understood the proposal here,
   splitting new features from old features doesn't seem to make much 
   sense in a draft intended to be just new features. Another part of the
   team comment suggests that the split be between new features that
   are completely backwards compatible from new features that aren't.
   Since the entire point of WF2 was that all new features be usable in
   ways that gracefully degrade, this would again mean the spec was just
   split into what is in WF2 today, and a second empty spec. So I'm not 
   really sure what they meant.

2. Providing comprehensive use cases and requirements. This doesn't really 
   belong in a spec, so I don't think we should change the spec to include 
   them. Many of the features were discussed on this mailing list and use
   cases and requirements were listed in detail in past discussions, 
   which can be found in the archives.

3. Mapping XForms to WF2 and back. This would be an interesting exercise, 
   but it basically comes down to "implement WF2 in XForms" and "implement
   XForms in WF2". These are huge tasks, which we don't really have the 
   time to do. Volunteers are welcome, however.

4. Participating in XHTML2 and XForms development. This is unrelated to
   the WF2 draft itself.

5. Build a community with the W3C. We're working on that, but again this 
   won't affect the draft itself.

So basically no, I don't think the process will be affected much.
 
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'