[whatwg] Comparison of XForms-Tiny and WF2

[Dave Raggett]

Hi Matthew,

The idea behind XForms-Tiny is to build on the strengths of both Web 
Forms 2.0 and XForms, and to incorporate ideas from both. I took a 
very practical approach to that by seeing how far I could get with a 
cross-browser library that works on as many as possible of today's 
browsers so that people can start using it now without needing to 
wait for native browser implementations. The library works on a very 
high percentage of today's desktop browsers and has been tested on 
Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2, Opera 9, 
Konqueror 3.5, and Safari. I will keep the library in sync with the 
specification work as that proceeds.

>From your comments, you seem to be very confident of your scripting 
skills, and would have no problem in emulating my examples on top of 
WF2. However, having to write and debug a new script for each new 
page soon gets tedious. Declarative approaches are much easier to 
write and much better suited as a target for authoring tools. I am 
working on an open source browser-based authoring tool for 
XForms-Tiny to demonstrate just that point. The declarative nature 
of the type, min, max, step, required, relevant, pattern, validate 
and calculate attributes in XForms-Tiny also makes it practical to 
automatically generate server side scripts for validating submitted 
data, which you would otherwise have to write separately from the 
client side code, with all the risks that that entails.

The current implementation of XForms-Tiny is just a snap shot, and I 
am working on incorporating more of the great ideas in WF2. The 
specification will be elaborated on the W3C Forms wiki over the next 
month or so, as a precursor to a W3C Working Draft.

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