[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 for Internet Explorer

[Dean Edwards]

For the last few weeks four programmers (myself, Erik Arvidsson, Dimitri
Glazkov and Olav Junker Kjær) have been building an IE implementation of
Web Forms 2.0 for Internet Explorer.

We now have a working version available for testing. Because we are
programmers we are rubbish at testing ourselves so we need the help of
this list to ensure quality before releasing to the general public.

This is an important development for the future of WF2/HTML5. Without a
good implementation for Internet Explorer the developer uptake will be
minimal. So by testing this development and ensuring its quality you
will be helping to secure the future of HTML5.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS DEVELOPMENT IS STILL NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION SO
I WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF YOU DID NOT BLOG ABOUT IT!!

Features
--------

The implementation is by no means complete but the bulk of WF2
functionality has been written. The following features are *not* present
in the first release:

- support for IE5.x
- Repetition model
- Complex submission formats (no fancy XML stuff)
- datetime/datetime-local controls
- data loading
- output control
- labels collection
- fieldset extensions
- internationalisation

The remaining WF2 extensions have been implemented and should work as
expected.

Some other things to note:

- The code is not yet optimised for speed/size
- The source code on SourceForge is not up to date so don't reference it

Testing
-------

The following things particularly need to be tested:

- event firing (oninput etc)
- validity state
- form submission (basic submission only)

Posting bug reports
-------------------

We are hosting this development on SourceForge so please use the bug
tracking system there:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=138872&atid=741957

I'd really appreciate some volunteers as dedicated testers. Obviously,
any testing is a good thing but it would be nice if there were someone
who would volunteer to coordinate testing. Please don't volunteer for
this task unless you can guarantee that you will be able to dedicate a
reasonable amount of time to it. You will need to know the spec fairly
well too!


Getting The Code
----------------

You can download version 0.1 of WF2 for IE here:

http://webforms2.org/download/wf2_0_1.zip

We have a pure OO solution. If you are interested in looking at the
source code in more detail you can browse it using a SmallTalk-like
interface here:

http://webforms2.org/dev/ide/

Thank you in advance for your testing efforts! :-)

-dean