Re: About the Web Forms 2 proposal

On Apr 28, 2007, at 9:03 PM, Doug Schepers wrote:

> John Boyer wrote:
>> And the use cases you listed here (
>> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/FormsUseCases) are pretty trivial.
>
> On the one hand, I agree that this list isn't really comprehensive.  
> When you consider some many Web applications use hoop-jumping  
> libraries to supply multiple dialogs and numerous inputs, there is  
> clearly a desire to have more complex forms than are addressed by  
> this list of use cases.

I'd love to hear examples, especially if you can cite multiple sites  
doing the same sort of thing.

> On the other hand, for many purposes, you can break complex "forms"  
> down into handy bite-sized portions.  I just did my taxes using  
> TurboTax; tax forms aren't what most people would call a breeze,  
> but they did a good job (for the most part) at breaking it down  
> into a wizardly set of steps.  They did fall down on breaking up my  
> home office across 2 subsequent addresses in combination with other  
> business expenses (which was done as a hidden "worksheet"), and  
> maybe a single, more cohesive form with declarative  
> interconnections could have addressed that... I don't know.  I do  
> think that in this case, I was glad it was broken down into steps,  
> which was less overwhelming.

That's a good point. Tax forms are pretty complex. But even here, I'm  
not sure declarative client-side features would help much. For  
security and data integrity reasons, you really need to checkpoint  
the data to the server often, time out the login session after some  
period of inactivity, and verify all the important calculations  
server-side.

Maybe we can think of features to improve tax forms. But let's keep  
in mind that this is a form most people fill in once a year, as  
opposed to the kind they fill in multiple times a day. I do realize  
there are exceptions for specific business domains, but I think

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Sunday, 29 April 2007 06:15:05 UTC