Re: About the Web Forms 2 proposal

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> On 4/28/07 9:49 PM, "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
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.
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On the web, no. But in private intranets that the web browsing public will
never see, I've done a heck of a lot of complex forms to reproduce the
internal paper forms used by their offices as best I could. It is a pain in
many many ways.

Most recently I've done a 4th version of a form with 118 entry fields.
Radio, checkbox, text, textarea, select, ajax based combo boxes, non ajax
based combo boxes other stuff
(yes is very bad design to have that many fields in a form but the client is
King as they say and the original form had that many on 1 sheet of legal
length paper)

I don't know what a 'declarative expression' is...so...i don't know what my
reply has to do with any of it but I like venting about how much of a
headache forms are for me. :)

But based on http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/FormsUseCases I'd like to point
out that we are now in the world of 'web Appllications' and I've seen some
monstrous forms in some desktop applications or built with excel/access that
when you see people actually use them and they show you the old paper
alternative you realize that the huge form on screen is actually better and
given the resources and short time frame their teams had to come up with the
computerized system, I realize that those massive forms were (1)the right
answer at that time (2) would likely be 5x more difficult to reproduce as a
web page without a javascript expert who use to be a desktop app guru.


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Received on Monday, 30 April 2007 21:05:07 UTC