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

[Jim Ley]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:15:20 -0800, Brad Fults <bfults at gmail.com> wrote:
> You seem to be completely missing the point that WF2 support is not
> required for the same user experience that you get right now from any
> given site. 

No, but if you don't then you actually increase the complexity of
authoring not decrease it.  Currently form validation is performed by
script, to still have this script in a web-forms world means you have
to start including checks to see if you have a web-forms UA on top of
the existing script (and we've not had a way to detect web-forms 2
UA's yet, other than the DOM Implementation hasFeature method which
requires full support as I imagine partial support arriving first it's
not going to help.

So whilst you could offer identical user experiences the cost will
increase rather than there being any benefit in using Web-Forms 2.0
features.

> Also, I would submit that users of Firefox, Opera, and Safari are more
> conscious of updates and will upgrade voluntarily (or if urged by an
> update manager), so delivery of the technology is not a problem.

Interesting submission, if it's sustainable one then the 16 million
reported FireFox downloads equates to considerably less than that
number of users.  However we measure things though non IE browsers on
the desktop are a minority, so just having Opera/FireFox and Safari
users upgrade more isn't actually all that likely to achieve a large
penetration for Web Forms 2.0 clients, which is what you need before
you can start dropping the script for validation of existing clients.

As it also would cost me 15 USD to upgrade Opera and at the moment my
version does a great job, I'm not completely sure I'd bother.

> As far as wasting time on WF2 instead of XUL or whatever else: you
> make the very large assumption that if those technologies were fully
> integrated into Opera and Safari, they would indeed be used by a large
> percentage of web authors.

I'm not making that assumption, I don't think it's all that likely
that any of the many proposed future technologies will attain much
traction for a long time.  However technologies that offer real
benefits have a better chance than WF2.

Jim.