Re: XForms not enough

Dear all

I was uncomfortable with the all-inclusiveness of Joe Hewitt's global
vision - and having just found that I can't access his website from my
very standard UNIX box (*) - I have re-read the XForms Requirements doc
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-forms-req).

Under "1.2 Target Audience" it says:

	"The main target audience for XForms is HTML 4 authors familiar
	with forms."

Hear hear!  Maybe this will give XForms a limited shelf-life, but if
(to echo Stanley Santiago's point) the form and data representation are
tightly coupled (+), AND we have a fairly intuitive widget set in the
presentation layer, then it will be used.

FWIW, I think the main standards we should be keeping an eye out for
are in the domains of data modelling, stylesheets and web accessibility.

Yours
Neil Walker
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Neil Walker                     tel:   +44 (0) 1223 330379
MRC Biostatistics Unit          fax:   +44 (0) 1223 330388
Cambridge, UK                   email: neil.walker@mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk
                                web:   http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk 
--------------------------------------------------------------------


(*) I'm used to this, of course: but I hope it makes the point that
there will remain a need for simple web pages and forms for a while
longer at least ...

(+) I'd like to be able to generate a workable form direct from a
database definition, and a database definition from a form. Something
like De Clarke's wisql or Tom Poindexter's iud_maker sping to mind for
the former.  To ANSWER Stanley Santiago's point - about how to get
dynamic content into an enumerated variable - you either do what you do
at the moment (which is *generate* the form with a CGI script), or,
more elegantly, add an attribute to the <string> element (xml:link?) 
that points us to the lookup database.

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 10:39:31 UTC