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

[Jim Ley]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:22:46 +0000, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> They're certianly web applications in my definition - they provide an
> interface which allows me to retrive, view and manipulate data.

What manipulation can you do on IMDB, and if we ignore the purchasing
part of amazon, what manipulation do you have there?  To me these are
simply websites, if they're not, then just about everything is a
web-application.

> I feel I must have missed your point here. Why does it matter if a
> (proprietry) web application (under your definition) consumes semantic
> markup, non semantic markup, binary data or anything else?

Because consuming semantic mark-up means that user agents can
understand the semantics of the mark-up, just rendering an HTML'ised
web-document view isn't particularly useful, it makes it extremely
difficult to re-purpose the data into other views.  Keeping the data
semantic until the last possible layer is a very good idea.

> What matters is the markup sent to the client is
> semantic or not, so that a user can interpret it without requiring a
> visual rendering.

Except of course you're ignoring yet again that web document level
semantics are near useless, you can guess that the <h1> is the subject
of the email, but how do we guess which is the from address, hmm I
guess that's the bit that matches a valid email address production, oh
no that might be the too, or maybe the cc, hmm web-document semantics
don't do a great job of really delivering semantics of applications.

An html version of a blog is indeed an alternate of the RSS, yet,
without knowing the HTML template used you cannot create an RSS view
from the HTML rendering, you can however create an HTML rendering from
the RSS - the RSS has sufficient semantics, the HTML doesn't.  This is
why I believe the semantic level arguments are so weak for the WHAT-WG
work, HTML simply doesn't cut it.

> Web Forms and more generally "HTML 5" 

HTML 5, where can I see the drafts of this specification?

Jim.