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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 8, 2005, at 16:15, Bill McCoy wrote:

> It has to be possible to build rich apps,
> simply. As someone else said in another thread somewhere "it's 2005 and
> we're still talking about rollovers". I happen to believe that "Street 
> HTML"
> just won't cut it for building rich interactive clients that are highly
> usable (by the ultimately users, end users not developers), and that 
> the
> best "worse is better" foundation lies in the XML technologies that 
> have
> been established in recent years (XHTML among them), and that promoting
> these technologies would be better for the open/web community than 
> letting
> proprietary tools win. Clearly a number of people on this list do not 
> agree.
> We will see.

One of the real issues is that the tag soup legacy is enormous. In 
intranet apps as well as Web apps, there are countless pieces of tag 
soup hopelessly entangled in JSP, PHP and ASP on one hand and in print 
statements on the other hand. Even if using SAX pipelines and document 
tree-based object models to produce XForms markup was more elegant and 
pure, upgrading from tag soup and tag soup producing methodology would 
mean throwing away the investment in the legacy code and starting over.

WF 2.0 allows incremental improvements to the mess but alternatively 
allows the back end to use pure XML tools.

If there are no updates to HTML, there's no guarantee that those 
companies who eventually would decide to move on from HTML would move 
to a multivendor W3C-recommended solution and would not move to XAML, 
Flash or Adobe Intelligent Document Platform.

As for the term "Street HTML", my impression had been that it was a 
marketing-friendly way of saying "tag soup", which is more common as a 
technical term.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/