XForms not enough

The effort behind development of the XForms standard seem to be a very small
part of the fastest growing trend in web development: powerful client-side
web application capabilities.

With that in mind, the scope of the XForms draft falls rather short of what
is really needed to take the web where it wants to go.  What we really need
is a complete "Web Application Model".  If you follow Mozilla at all you'll
notice growing momentum in this area using non-standard XML languages (like
XUL).  I think that it is rather short-sighted to concentrate on the topic
of "forms".

Forms are really just a way of collecting data from user input and
transferring it to the server.  There is a lot more to a web application
than that. I think the level of coupling between "forms" and a full
client-side data/presentation framework is fairly tight.... tight enough to
justify integrating XForms with a larger project now, before it is too late.
The last thing we need is a spec that fragments the web even further.

We need a model for non-page-driven web applications.  We need a robust data
model (like XSchema), a robust User Interface framework (like XUL, CSS, and
SVG), a solid set of UI components (like XUL, Swing, or MFC), and mechanisms
for request-response exchanges of data (like SOAP and RPC).  All of these
things should absolutely be developed in parallel with full integration in
mind.  The current state of fragmentation is quit sad.

I am sure I'm not the only person thinking this way... perhaps even members
of the XForms working group would agree with me.  I only hope the situation
is resolved before XForms is recommended.

- Joe

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2000 21:28:22 UTC