- From: John Boyer <boyerj@ca.ibm.com>
- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:42:58 -0700
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>, Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>, public-html@w3.org, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer <sebastian@dreamlab.net>
- Message-ID: <OF3500439B.2D34956E-ON882572CC.000CC610-882572CC.000EEC5E@ca.ibm.com>
Hi Maciej, The analogy was exactly the right one. Please try again. The hybrid approach in XForms is another technology for solving the same problems more easily than using an imperative script approach alone, just like the script approach is more desirable than writing it in machine language. You've looked around and found that you don't see the need for the better solution because, you say, no one is using the new solutions right now in their existing solutions. The existing solutions use just plain javascript because that's all they have right now. We're trying to talk about a better way to do things that makes it possible to do current things more easily and to do even harder things that would be quite hard to do with existing challenges. Just like using electricity and a light bulb is better than using a torch, even for reading something as antiquated as reading a book. And the use cases you listed here ( http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/FormsUseCases) are pretty trivial. And yes people in many verticals (government, financial, insurance, healthcare, etc.) do in fact want to have a more usable forms technology, and their requirements really are more complex than the use cases you are looking at. John M. Boyer, Ph.D. STSM: Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher Chair, W3C Forms Working Group Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software IBM Victoria Software Lab E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> 04/28/2007 06:49 PM To John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA cc Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>, Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>, public-html@w3.org, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer <sebastian@dreamlab.net> Subject Re: About the Web Forms 2 proposal On Apr 28, 2007, at 5:29 PM, John Boyer wrote: > I think you missed the point about the declarative vs. imperative > debate, and then got it later in the email, so I won't go into that. > > Looking only at the forms that showed up as popular in your web > survey is looking in the wrong place to find out how to solve forms > problems because you're only looking at the things people know how > to do easily as evidenced by the fact that they have done it > often. You will not find too many examples of the forms we would > like for people to be able to build because they don't build them > as often. And they don't build them as often because it is too > hard and they give up. > > I can see an argument like yours being made to Henry Ford or Thomas > Edison. "Hi, everyone is traveling with horse drawn carriage and I > don't see anyone driving around in a purely mechanical object so > there must not be a need for an automobile" or "Hi, everyone seems > to be reading using sunlight or torchlight; I don't see anyone > trying to use glass, tungsten and an inert gas to read, so there > must not be a need for a light bulb." It makes no sense! I think you are making a false analogy and overall a fallacious argument. Your analogy confuses two separate things, use cases and technologies that fulfill them. My personal standard for technologies is that if a use-case is popular, but current technologies make it hard to do well, then it is worth looking at improvements or new technologies. "Land travel between two points" is a use case. "Horse-drawn carriage" and "automobile" are technologies that fulfill that use case. So by my standard the high popularity of "horse-drawn carriage" is actually positive evidence in favor of "automobile", if we believe it will fulfill the use case better. Let's bring this back to the web for a moment. Video on the web is hard to do well. Approaches to it integrate poorly with the rest of your content, and rely on external technologies that must often be separately downloaded, such as QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media or RealPlayer. Yet despite this, it is immensely popular. The fact that it is hard hasn't stopped people from doing it, because users want it. So this is a good case for enhancing the basic web technology to make the experience better for authors and users. Contrast this to forms that could benefit from declarative expressions. We've agreed that the way forms are used today on the web, most would not benefit. Now, it is possible that there is an untapped hidden demand for such forms but they are just too hard to do. But I think this is unlikely. When users want something, web developers tend to provide it, even if it is hard. Besides video, here are some other things that are hard to do well on the web that are still becoming fairly popular: animated UI elements, rich text editing, updating page state without a full page load, drag-and-drop and dynamic client-side graphics. Clearly mere difficulty is not an obstacle. Furthermore, declarative expressions are available on the web today, if somewhat inconveniently. XForms plugins are available, and Dave Raggett's XForms Transitional prototype shows that declarative features can be provided through a script library. I haven't run into a website that uses either, except for demo purposes. These factors make me doubt that there is a large untapped demand. Now, maybe there is evidence to the contrary. But to add a singificant new functionality to HTML, I think we need to actually establish that it would be helpful for things lots of people want to do on the web. We can't add every feature, and complex features especially need to justify themselves. Adding a complex feature that won't actually be used a lot is a significant opportunity cost, so it needs to have a clear benefit. > Finally, it sounds like you don't have much experience trying to > develop a larger, more complicated form when you claim that > expressions only make things easier in toy forms. Have you ever > tried to put an insurance or financial application online? If you > ever do, you will begin to understand why we want expressions. You're right that I have not spent a lot of time developing forms. But I have spent a lot of time studying the forms developed by others and deployed on the web, particularly cases where they malfunction. Insurance and financial applications are not in fact very common on the web, and I don't see a declarative expression feature changing that. They're not very popular because they are not the kind of thing most people want to do a lot, not because they are hard. Incidentally, I put my list of forms use cases here, I think it will be relevant to future discussion: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/FormsUseCases Regards, Maciej
Received on Sunday, 29 April 2007 02:43:21 UTC