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

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Bill McCoy wrote:
>
> By "HTML" I mean "HTML+JavaScript+CSS": what Opera calls "Street HTML". 
> I'm not aware that processing arbitrary "Street HTML" (with its 
> DOM-scripting and CSS arcana) as XML in Java-based systems is a solved 
> problem.  Certainly TagSoup doesn't handle this stuff at all.

Web Forms 2 supports being used as an XML-only format as well, so if 
supporting XML+JavaScript+CSS is a solved problem (is it?) then you could 
just use that instead. The only problem there would be that you lose much 
of the backwards compatibility (i.e. it no longer works in WinIE6).

(CSS arcana?!)


> I find it odd that some WHATWG members argue that transmitting arbitrary 
> XML data over the wire to clients is a bad idea ( 
> http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1064828134&count=1 ) given that the solutions 
> already widely employed in Street HTML - encoding data in JavaScript 
> arrays and other tricks - are so much less "Semantic Web" friendly.

Oh, sending data embedded in JS is just as bad. However, the prevalence of 
one kind of bad practice is no justification for another kind.


> To pick an extreme example, Google folks admit that search-indexing a 
> Gmail screen would be extremely challenging (they themselves index the 
> raw data of course, but that's the whole point - it's much easier to 
> process structured data before it's been compiled into a presentational 
> form that is partially programmatic code). The WHATWG proposals to 
> promote scripting, rather than declarative markup, as the basis of forms 
> data binding and validation, and to dispense with an XML-based data 
> model separate from presentation, would seem likely to worsen this 
> situation by leading to more Gmail-like JavaScript-centric web 
> applications.

On the contrary, WF2 mostly consists of attempting to _reduce_ the amount 
of scripting required to validate forms in HTML.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'