[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 - what does it extend , definition of same,

[James Graham]

Jim Ley wrote:

>On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 01:15:14 +1300, Matthew Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>It is quite impressive for you to have snipped my answer to your
>>question and then to have asked it.
>>    
>>
>
>Unfortunately, that's not an answer to who the WE are, in terms of
>web-applications, Amazon and IMDB are certainly not relevant, they're
>not web-applications, they publish information, that's a very
>different use case, and isn't a use case that Web Forms 2.0 or Web
>Applications is addressing.
>
They're certianly web applications in my definition - they provide an 
interface which allows me to retrive, view and manipulate data. Do you 
only consier web applications to be "thin-client" analouges to existing 
desktop applications (e.g. GMail, bloglines)? If not, what is a web 
application under your definition?

>>>You're also missing one of the elements, non-arbitrary XML - For
>>>example Bill McCoy's RSS reader won't be consuming arbitrary XML.
>>>      
>>>
>>That's not relevant. We're talking about what applications are written
>>in, not about what they consume. 
>>    
>>
>
>Are we?  I thought we'd been discussing Bill McCoy's excellent points
>on how web-applications are put together, one of which is that
>consuming appropriate XML semantics in your web-application is a good
>thing - that's something that XForms and XBL and others allow, it's
>not something that the work here is contributing too.
>  
>
I feel I must have missed your point here. Why does it matter if a 
(proprietry) web application (under your definition) consumes semantic 
markup, non semantic markup, binary data or anything else?  That only 
matters if your web application is consuming a format also consumed by 
other applications and only then if the format itself is designed with 
accessibility in mind. What matters is the markup sent to the client is 
semantic or not, so that a user can interpret it without requiring a 
visual rendering. Web Forms and more generally "HTML 5" allow this by 
extending the range of UI elements that can be used in HTML browsers 
without recourse to javascript and by providing additional sematic 
elements that may be used to convey information.