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

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 23:42:04 +0100, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome at opera.com> wrote:
> Neither do I. Street HTML is a slightly humorous term we use at Opera
> to describe the mess we wade through. We don't encourage it, nor
> propose to build web applications on it. Indeed, our efforts in WHAT
> WG is meant to ensure that tomorrow's applications are *not* written
> in an undefined dialect.

Current web applications use HTML almost exclusively as a rendering
language, they're not even using the document semantics available in
HTML, it's just script and CSS dangling off of the HTML elements you
need.

Increasing the amount of HTML elements and form tipes out there
doesn't change this fact, they're not going to do quite enough -
There's the eternal problem of the declaritive, it can only go 80% of
the way there, so you end up employing scripters who are much happier
doing it all in script, the disciplines being different.

If the WHAT WG's aim is to improve Web Application authoring, then
it's scripting that needs to be helped, tweaking at the edge isn't
going to do anything.

If the WHAT WG's aim is to discourage what they call street HTML, then
removing the ambiguity and the mess of the existing HTML and de-facto
specifications into something well grounded will be a lot more useful
than simply introducing more stuff that'll end up in the variously
implemented bin.

> XML's draconian
> "stop-processing!" rule does not mix well with the natural laziness of
> authors or the last-minute quick fix required by their managers.

Just because there is one ridiculous rule in XML when used for user
centric languages, doesn't mean that just building on a mess of ill
defined HTML is appropriate.   Sure the XML processing rules make it
near useless for use on the web if they're adhered to, but we can get
more rigourous than the HTML mess.

Jim.