Re: XForms Myths Exposed - By Ian Hixie (Opera)

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, T. V. Raman wrote:
> 
> The Web Forms fans' attempt to polarize between XForms and scripting is 
> unfortunate ---

The Web Forms fans are not at all attempting to make this comparison -- 
the origin of this discussion is actually a statement by Steven Pemberton, 
relayed in a recent news article:

   http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39181670,00.htm

The only "polarisation", if there is any, is between XForms and backwards 
compatibility. Personally I agree that the Web would be better with less 
scripting required to perform basic tasks -- but I don't think that we 
need to have a new language to do this. We can just incrementally improve 
the existing technologies, like HTML. The Web Forms 2 proposal draft:

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/

...is an example of how HTML can be extended to take care of many simple 
things (that are currently done with scripting) declaratively, without 
losing backwards-compatibility with the existing Web content and UAs.

I understand if you, as an XForms working group member, do not want to be 
involved in this kind of work. It is certainly not glamorous, indeed it is 
hard, boring work. But in my opinion it is better for the Web for us to 
maintain compatibility in this way than to make new standards that are 
incompatible with the old content and browsers.


> Today's debate over "I can write script, who needs a higher level 
> abstraction" is no different from assembly programmers in the early days 
> of C compilers complaining about not needing anything more since they 
> could write assembler well enough, thank you very much.

That is not the debate I am taking part in, if that debate even exists. 
The debate I am trying to raise is, to extend your analogy, the same as 
the x86 compiler vendors complaining that the RISC ideas are all very well 
but they have a growing x86 installed base with a lot of demand and so 
that's what they want to target.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 14 March 2005 02:45:02 UTC