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

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 15:19:11 +0100, Olav Junker Kjær <olav at olav.dk> wrote:
> Well, the motivation is to make it easier to build web applications, by
> having a standard declarative way to build forms with validation, menus
> etc.

These things aren't what's difficult right now, they're things you do
at most once (you either do it yourself, or you pick it off the shelf
from other people, Google and others re-use a lot of code they find on
the web.)

> This may give a tremendous increase in productivity for web
> authors.

Not at all, there's not much being added to the Web Forms, and
importantly whilst this theoretical you can implement it in IE with
script is much talked about, there's no actual announcements of a
commercial quality implementation ever coming about.  I really can't
see it coming in less than 18 months, unless it is actually done as a
commercial product, or with big contributions from the WHAT-WG
members.  Neither of which I think is likely, and neither of which I
think would be a good idea.

Without a WHAT-WG library to do all the web-forms stuff in IE, the web
application authors have just increased their work, as now, rather
than just having to implement the widgets they need, they will have to
implement them in a way compatible with Web Forms 2.0.

> Of course it would be cool if WHATWG could extend the underlying
> platform with things you can't do with script now, but this is not
> goning to  happen as long as Microsoft are not part of WHAT (and even if
> they were, it would take years).

Not at all, I'd encourage you to go and read Bill McCoy's points
again.  The big problem is that building a bit better product to fight
the entrenched one is never going to work, you need to build something
much, much better to overcome the inertia that the product has.

Jim.