RE: Leaving the Working Group

Hi Keith,

It was great working with you; you've surely made a great contribution to the group.
I wish you luck with your new assignment.

Greetings,

Nick
From: public-forms-request@w3.org [mailto:public-forms-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Keith Wells
Sent: dinsdag 17 februari 2009 20:19
To: Forms WG
Subject: Leaving the Working Group


Dear Working Group members,

I mentioned several weeks ago in our teleconference that I may be transitioning away from XForms and moving to new assignments in my department at IBM. Well it has happened and I have to refocus my energies to new areas starting this week. Sadly, I will not be focused on XForms as a standard any more, but I will always continue advocating XForms as a superior tool for rapidly authoring robust web apps and easily presenting our client's and customer's data in their web browsers. Data presented anywhere, anytime!

In my opinion, XForms has not received the accolades it deserves! Simplification, presentation, reuse of other standards, MVC, ease-of-authoring, abstraction; the people in the Forms Working Group have done an excellent job in designing XForms 1.0/1.1 and are years ahead in thought-share for opening complex web development from several thousand JavaScript and HTML developers to, well, several hundred-thousand (or more) authors, or to anyone who can learn declarative markup (assuming this task is easier than learning Java/JavaScript). To me, this is a revolutionary concept and we have been seeing other efforts to create declarative markup for AJAX/JavaScript expand from work in the Forms WG, in fact, several of our fellow Forms Working Group members are leading this charge!

A comment from a fellow IBMer on a conference call one day, he said “I JUST want it to work!”. How many times have we heard this statement from a customer, and then several months later, we hear “I JUST want it to work, AND I want it to be inexpensive to build, AND I want it to be even cheaper to maintain”. Well, compared to C++. Java, and even JavaScript applications, XForms applications meet ALL THREE criteria – and you don't need a programmer involved at all!

As I say goodbye to my friends in the Forms Working Group, I applaud your efforts over the years, I thank you for your innovation and ingenuity you have transposed to words in the XForms 1.1 specification, and I implore you to continue in your efforts to abstract "programming constructs" to "declarative markup" to simplify the “art” of programming in the development of Rich Internet Applications.

Thank you all for your friendship and patience with a less-so-abstract thinker! :) I hope to run into each of you in my future! It has been fun for me!

P.S. I have had a lot of fun hanging-out with you spec-writers -- you are a very different breed from your average programmer! (I am not saying that is good or bad, but my goodness, you can discuss a single small concept for hours if not days (and sometimes WEEKS)! haha ).

Thanks,
Keith

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