[whatwg] WebForms vs XForms

[Håkon Wium Lie]

Also sprach Jon Ferraiolo:

 > I haven't been following WebForms in the past few months, but when my 
 > colleague Bill McCoy told me that he has participated in this forum, I took 
 > a look.

Great to have you here!

 > I looked at the WebForms 2.0 spec and was surprised at its size. I created 
 > a PDF out of the WebForms spec and got 101 pages. In comparison, I created 
 > a PDF out of the XForms 1.0 spec and got 127 pages. Given that WebForms is 
 > still under development and XForms is approved, one would expect some 
 > further growth, making the size of the two specs about the same.

I think you raise a valid point; ideally the specification will become
smaller rather than larger from now on. However, XForms has
dependencies on other specifications (XSD, XPath) which makes it more
complex than a page count seems. WF has similar dependencies on DOM
but this seems less scary since DOM is already deployed.

 > When I did a quick survey of features, I see major overlap. My conclusion 
 > is that WebForms to a large extent is simply just a competitive format with 
 > XForms. If you are going to add 100+ pages of incremental features to the 
 > browser world, of which a major portion has already been defined by the 
 > W3C, why not build from XForms, which is an approved standard 

HTML is also an approved standard. 

 > Perhaps Web Forms started out with the goal of doing something small as 
 > minor increments to existing HTML, but now it seems to have grown into a 
 > rather large beast of its own. Also, perhaps Web Forms started when XForms 
 > had little traction and therefore could be discounted, but in 2004 interest 
 > in XForms has picked up quite a bit.

Perhaps. Personally, I don't hear the thunder. 

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
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