[whatwg] Comparison of XForms-Tiny and WF2

[Dave Raggett]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007, Jon Ferraiolo wrote:

> I have a very simple question from the land of Ajax (and OpenAjax 
> Alliance). Can either XForms-Tiny or WF2 be implemented in 
> JavaScript such they run on today's browsers, or do they both 
> require new version of browsers (or plugins) to ship before the 
> features can be used?
>
> Jon

XForms-Tiny does indeed run on today's browsers, see

   http://www.w3.org/2006/11/XForms-Tiny/

Where you can try it out for yourself on your browser on a wide 
range of examples. This makes use of an open source cross browser 
script library that works on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5, 
Firefox 2, Opera 9, Konqueror 3.5, Safari, Opera Mobile 8.6 and 
NetFront 3.4. When delivered via HTTP as a compressed file, the 
download size is only 6 KBytes. The library will be updated to 
reflect changes to the specification, and a first Working Draft is 
expected in early 2007.

WF2 has been implemented as a script library for Internet Explorer 
and in principle a cross browser library could be developed. 
However, web page developers would still need to write additional 
page specific scripts to match the features that are built into 
XForms-Tiny. For a single page that might be okay but the costs soon 
add up when accumulated across applications. A declarative approach 
reduces the development cost and likelihood of errors. Another 
advantage is the means to automatically generate the server side 
validation from the markup rather than having to code it separately 
with the risk of mismatch between the client and server code.

p.s. I am looking into providing declarative support for using Ajax to 
support dynamic load and save operations without the need for any 
additional scripting other than loading the XForms-Tiny library.

  Dave Raggett <dsr at w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

>
> Jon Ferraiolo <jferrai at us.ibm.com>
> Web Architect, Emerging Technologies
> IBM, Menlo Park, CA
> Mobile: +1-650-926-5865