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

Jim Ley jim.ley at gmail.com
Wed Jan 12 02:56:11 PST 2005


On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 19:20:55 -0500, dolphinling
<dolphinling at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Jim Ley wrote:
> That's not what I'LL be doing, I'll be using <input type='email'> so WF2
> browsers can get easy client-side validation, and leaving the non-WF2
> browsers to use server-side validation.

Can I ask when you'll make the move, how many WF2 clients will your
users need to have for you to consider using it?  How much additional
bandwidth and server processing will you accept?  How many annoyed
customers will you accept when your site doesn't perform as well as
all your competitors?

A simple google suggests the Global internet reach is well over
750million, if we assume that there are 500million browsers being used
by these people, then you need to get 250million browsers upgraded
before a majority of people can use your new features.

I think we've seen with FireFox celebrating each million download how
difficult it is to get browsers into the marketplace now.  Most people
have no reason to upgrade.

I can appreciate that there are a group of people making certain types
of web-pages who can ignore the legacy clients, they're not authoring
the majority of pages, and certainly not the majority of
web-applications.  I also appreciate they have been traditionally an
important market for Mozilla clients.   However they're not an
important market in the real world, if you can't bank, or can't book
your flight etc.  then you can be encouraged to upgrade/install
plugins, but it's only sites where usability and server load do matter
that have any hope of convincing a user to upgrade.

Jim.



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