Re: Is XForms a failure to learn from?

Alain,

thanks for starting this thread. This way at least we can learn
something from the past.

IMO it's not primarly the question if XForms is a failure - XForms is
just a symthon of the general 'desease'. The W3C has done a lot of
unvaluable good to the internet by providing good standards but it
totally fails in marketing those. There were the early days when their
work was adopted early by the market for whatever reasons.

But times change and a lot of concurrent technologies evolved esp. in
the JavaScript area. They attract a lot of developers with their shiny
websites and often a very good marketing. If then only 1 or 2 major
companies support the new tool it will gain a lot of attention and
followers even when being proprietary.

Futher problems are in the inherent policies defined for W3C specs. E.g.
new standards must re-use other W3C standards if something exists in
that area. Though it seems to follow the good old 'reuse' pattern it can
also lead to overly bloated, hard to use and change standards.

In XForms you must have at least basic understanding of HTML, XML, XSD,
XPath, DOM Events, CSS and of course the XForms syntax. That's a lot and
a hurdle when tryping to get productive quickly.

Standards are hard work and need a lot of time to complete. Assumptions
made in the beginning of a evolving standard might change over the years
it needs to complete a spec. But with the current policies it nearly
impossible to revert a decision taken in a former spec (surely
discussion of backward compat is beyond this thread). It's surely very
hard to get this right - on the one hand we love standard because the
live longer than trends (we got enough of those) but on the other they
need to adapt to a changing world.

But main point remains - unless W3C won't wake up and start to market
its work, motivate working groups to produce videos and other
promotional material it will struggle to establish any new work unless
one of the big steps up to do this work.

And of course there are also failures in XForms but that's another mail.

Joern


Am 12.10.14 11:07, schrieb Alain Couthures:
> All,
> 
> Having a look at AB/2014-2015 Priorities/w3c work success
> (https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB/2014-2015_Priorities/w3c_work_success), I
> can read that XForms is one of the "failures to learn from".
> 
> Surely, there is a lot to be said about XForms as a failure. In this
> list of "failures", I would personally add XSLT and XQuery for very
> similar reasons, and surely SVG some years ago, if they all had to be
> considered as effective Web, or client-side, technologies.
> 
> What do you think? Shouldn't we write what has to be written?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -Alain
>

Received on Thursday, 16 October 2014 07:45:57 UTC