Re: About the Web Forms 2 proposal

Hi Daniel,

I am deeply familiar with requirements of forms for vertical industries.

1) Weaknesses in CSS should not be used as an excuse for limiting 
innovation in HTML, otherwise limitations in HTML will then be used as an 
excuse for limiting advancement of CSS.

2a) Verticals like insurance are finding huge benefits from XForms.  You 
completely miss the point.  The spreadsheet was built to move power *out 
of the hands* of expensive professionals and into the hands of people 
closer to the domain experts.  XForms seeks the same effect now.  Before 
high level language were invented, only expensive contractors were able to 
maintain the machine language needed for computer programs.  Now we're 
having the same thing happen with the machine language of the web, and 
it's time to learn the high level language lesson again.

2b) Why on earth do you think XForms is different in spirit than the "main 
content language's"?  First of all, the spirit of the language is what you 
define it to be, so XForms is only against the grain if you choose it to 
be.  Second, HTML markup is inherently declarative. It says "there shall 
exist a form and it shall contain these controls and the controls shall 
have these properties" and so it does and they do and they do.  The only 
thing we're talking about here is whether a "property" is allowed to be 
dynamically defined via an expression.  What you want is to have the 
properties exist and only be changeable by external imperative means. That 
isn't the only way to do things, and it certainly isn't always the best. 

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





Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> 
Sent by: public-html-request@w3.org
04/28/2007 05:55 PM

To
John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
cc
Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, 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







John Boyer wrote:

> Have you ever tried to put an insurance or financial application online?

I did, in former professionnal lives.

Thinking back about it, I can draw two conclusions :

   1. CSS is still far from allowing an existing insurance or financial
      form to be online because it does not allow to position a given
      element in function of the position of any other arbitrary element.
      Please take a look at [1] to understand what I mean.

   2. the last 2 things an insurance or financial organization putting
      an application online wants are

      a. a forms language so complex only an expensive contractor is able
         to maintain it
      b. a forms language with a spirit different from the main content
         language's

I have zillions of real-life examples.

[1] http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/position__new.html

</Daniel>