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

Preston L. Bannister wrote:
> Personally, my reaction on first reading the XForms and WHATWG Web Forms
> description was that it was irrelevant.  Irrelevant to me at least.  The
> declarative approach in HTML is doomed to be incomplete

It doesn't need to be complete. It just needs to cover the 80% use cases
to make life easy for the developer, and consistent for the user. (This
latter is the real win for the web, imo; having only a single
datepicker, rather than three dozen slightly incompatible ones.)
And personally, as a web application developer, I'm already continuously
tempted to use the new form controls. Take <input type="number"> for
example - there's hardly ever an application where I don't ask the user
to enter a number in a textbox somewhere. Real validation happens on the
server of course, but it makes for a nicer user experience to have the
input box already only allow valid input. Yes, I could write yet another
JavaScript function to do take care of this (and to be fair, I often
do), but there's also plenty of cases where I don't get around to it, or
don't want to bloat my .js files, and don't. Yet if I could set the
constraints for the input declaratively, that's something I would do
right then and there. Even if only 5% of the users at present would
benefit from it, that'd still be worth it for me.

Cheers,
Sander

-- 
Sander van Lambalgen   * Have Skill Webdevelopment
http://have-skill.com/ * "Have Skill, Will Travel"

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2007 19:10:46 UTC