Re: About the Web Forms 2 proposal

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer wrote:
>
>> XForms Transitional [...] introduces an expression syntax, Web 
>> Forms 2.0 does not.
>
> WF2 doesn't, because it has not been shown how it could work. We spent
> significant time and resources trying to find a way to make it work.

I think you owe it to the Web to try a little harder as there are 
many kinds of users, many of which would benefit from such 
expressions, just like they have benefited from the invention of 
spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are very widely used and there are plenty 
of prior art for using expressions for validation and for calculated 
values.

A well defined expression language with a fixed set of predefined 
functions can certainly be made to work. Will you accept the 
challenge of working out how to make that fit with the rest of WF2?

> The 'relevant' feature is available in the proposed HTML5 specs 
> today, as noted above.

It is obviously tempting to identify relevancy with disabled, but 
that would be to miss an opportunity to support wizards such as you 
find on online ordering sites (including Apple's) where you are 
taken through a sequence of choices with material irrelevant to the 
current state hidden from view. For this we need to be able to
hide fields but to do so in such a way that their values are still 
submitted as part of the form.


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

Received on Friday, 27 April 2007 08:48:10 UTC