[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 - what does it extend , definition of same, relation to XForms, implementation reqs.

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 1, 2005, at 20:13, Bill McCoy wrote:

> Whereas Web Forms 2.0, being a script-intensive solution built on an
> ill-defined non-XML language is clearly not going to be nearly as easy 
> to
> handle in server-based workflows. Indeed one of the world's largest web
> sites maintains a large-scale Windows server stack merely to run MSHTML
> server-side. While keeping web documents arcane and difficult to 
> process may
> be a source of commercial advantage to browser manufacturers it 
> doesn't seem
> like a great solution for the industry as a whole.

I assume you mean HTML when you say "ill-defined non-XML language", 
because Web Forms 2.0 supports an XML submission format.

Non-Microsoft enterprise server systems that deal with XML are 
typically implemented in Java. Processing HTML as XML in Java-based 
systems is a solved problem. The app internals are written for XHTML 
and conversion is done on the IO boundary. TagSoup by John Cowan is 
used on input an HTML serializer[2] is used on output.

If it looks better, one could consider WF 2.0 syntax an extension the 
XHTML that has been immediately backported to HTML. :-)

[1] http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/
[2] eg. 
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/cms/src/fi/iki/hsivonen/xml/HtmlSerializer.java

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/