Re: HTML forms, XForms, Web Forms - which and how much?

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Maciej made some good arguments about what use cases XForms 
> actually addresses that authors have trouble with solving today on 
> the web. Also pointing out that far more complicated problems are 
> already solved. I think it would be good if that's looked into 
> some more.

I am also curious about what problems current developers have and 
why. The existing Forms DOM is sufficiently powerful to do lot, 
albeit with a fair amount of scripting, but WF2 still requires 
considerable competence in scripting for all but the simplest 
applications. One could say that the only genuinely new thing that 
WF2 adds that couldn't be done before is support for slider 
controls.

Can anyone shed any light on the problems that website developers 
are having, and whether this is something that could be addressed 
with outreach on how to use scripting and the DOM rather than as a 
need for new features? Outreach is a lot cheaper than creating new 
standards!

One example, I am aware of is the irritating way that many websites 
don't allow you to type the spaces within credit card numbers, even 
though the spaces can be stripped out with a single line of script. 
One possibility is that many developers can't be bothered to learn 
even the rudiments of regular expressions, but that is just 
guesswork on my behalf. Another wild guess is that there is no 
reward to making your payment page more usable than other websites. 
If you have written such a payment form, I would be really 
interested to hear your story on this.

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

Received on Monday, 30 April 2007 14:17:14 UTC