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

[Olav Junker Kjær]

>> I happen to believe that "Street HTML"
>> just won't cut it for building rich interactive clients that are highly
>> usable (by the ultimately users, end users not developers), and that the
>> best "worse is better" foundation lies in the XML technologies that have
>> been established in recent years (XHTML among them), and that promoting
>> these technologies would be better for the open/web community than letting
>> proprietary tools win. Clearly a number of people on this list do not agree.
>> We will see.

"Web applications" are applications which run in normal browsers. You 
just go to the URL, and the app runs.
"Custom applications" are applications requiring that users download and 
install specific client software. Custom software may be far more 
advanced and rich than web application.

There are all kinds of different technologies which can be used for 
building custom applications, and XUL, XForms and SVG might be very 
cool. However, WHATWG are not concerned about developing a framework for 
building custom application. WHATWG is concerned about building a 
platform for web applications.

Internet Explorer 6 has by far the largets marketshare, and while its 
nice that better browsers are gaining, IE6 will remain dominant for the 
forseeable future - like it or not. If an application doesnt run in IE6, 
it simply doesn't qualify as a web application, since it requires most 
users to download and install new software.

Thefore it must be possible to implement the WHAT specs on top of 
Internet Explorer, using only non-binary extensions. XHTML, SVG, XForms 
etc. is simply out of the picture, although we might all agree that they 
are technically better for building rich applications.

Olav Junker Kjær