RE: [ANN] 'Introduction to XForms' Tutorial

Thanks for the comments Anne.

I certainly don't disagree with you that namespaces are a complicated
subject. But the angle I was taking is whether that has to matter. If you
tell an author that they need to put xmlns:xf="..." at the top of some
document template, and then they always use that template to start a new
project, what's wrong with that?

As authors learn more they will fill in the gaps, and the good thing about
an 'XML stack' of languages is that at least what you learn contributes to
your understanding of other languages--if you know XPath from XSLT, for
example, you can apply it to XForms. That is very different to learning a
JavaScript library, for example, where all you have learned is relevant only
to that library.

So I'm not disagreeing with you Anne, but I'm just trying to find a way
round it, and help people take those first steps into XForms. I think a big
problem for people new to XForms is that everyone who already knows XForms
immediately wants to tell the new author about namespaces and XPath! I was
trying to show with this tutorial that actually, not every form needs to be
complex (I don't even use instance data), and for simple forms that do
pretty much what an HTML form does, XForms is just as easy, and far more
powerful.

Regards,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
CEO
x-port.net Ltd.

e: Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net
t: +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
b: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/
w: http://www.formsPlayer.com/

Download our XForms processor from
http://www.formsPlayer.com/  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anne van Kesteren [mailto:fora@annevankesteren.nl] 
> Sent: 30 January 2006 10:30
> To: Mark Birbeck
> Cc: www-forms@w3.org
> Subject: Re: [ANN] 'Introduction to XForms' Tutorial
> 
> Quoting Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@x-port.net>:
> > The first in what will be a new series of XForms tutorials 
> is now online.
> > The 'Introduction to XForms', is available at:
> >
> >  <http://skimstone.x-port.net/index.php?q=introduction-to-xforms>
> 
> (Removed w3c-forms@w3.org from the cc list.)
> 
> Regarding the tutorial, I spotted it says that 
> "something.html" should be your filename. That's just wrong. 
> Given that ".html" is mostly associated (both by the OS and 
> browsers) with text/html processing it will never be 
> recognized as XML and no namespace dispatching will take 
> place... Such things may cause a huge compatibility problem 
> for future UAs. (Similar to the no-namespaced SVG files that 
> can be found around the web.)
> 
> 
> > This approach was taken to counter the view that we seem to 
> find that 
> > 'XForms is difficult to learn'. (We've even come across this from 
> > people who are teaching XForms!) You'll see from the 
> tutorial that in 
> > fact XForms is very easy to get up and running with, in a 
> short amount 
> > of time. And I think even experienced XForms users may be 
> surprised to 
> > remind themselves just how much XForms can do even at the 
> 'simple' end.
> 
> It is difficult. People don't understand namespaces for 
> instance. They also don't understand MIME types. They 
> complain about <acronym> being removed from XHTML 2 because 
> it is the only variant (of <abbr> and <acronym>) that is 
> supported by IE... Missing the fact that IE does not support 
> XHTML 1 in an XML way (and therefore does not support XHTML 
> at all...) and that XHTML 2 is in a different namespace which 
> means they are completely different elements from an AWWW 
> point of view. Oh well.
> 
> 
> --
> Anne van Kesteren
> <http://annevankesteren.nl/>
> 
>

Received on Monday, 30 January 2006 10:53:29 UTC