RE: NetScape/IE

I agree that Microsoft and Netscape are
unlikely to support XForms, but I very
strongly disagree with the disruptive
pseudo-quote "There is nothing called
XForms, it's just a draft...".

Only because Microsoft and Netscape do not 
support XForms, for whatever reasons, this 
is no indication at all whether XForms is 
a good idea, whether it solves an important 
problem and thus whether it has a market we
will see products being offered for. 

Or the other way around: Even if Microsoft
and Netscape *would* support XForms, how
long would you think it would take until 
XForms can be used, ie. at least 80% of all
browsers deployed out there have native 
XForms support?

It would take several years, and no-one here
is willing to wait until then, since XForms
is needed, and needed now.

XSLT, for example, took off quite well 
without Microsoft and Netscape ever 
implementing it in the browser. So can we all
stop judging important standards and technologies 
based on Microsoft's interests and strategies 
for a moment?

XForms is very similar to XSLT in the way that 
XForms as a concept can be implemented as a 
generic server-side transformation process, 
transcoding XForms into whatever you want
and whatever the client can process.

Since XForms is *very* flexible (Three parts:
Model, Data Instance and UI, whereas every
part in itself is flexible - use any arbitrary
XML instance for data, use any existent or
custom UI markup language for the UI, use a
small subset, or all of XML Schema as the basis
for the Model), we do not see a single 
implementation of XForms, but various depending 
on the specific needs. XForms is a highly 
modular, application level W3C technology with
a million use cases, solving a simple problem
by giving XML a standard, bi-directional 
Human-Computer-Interface framework other XML
applications can build upon.

Because of that, several companies have already
customly implemented XForms in their software 
projects, leveraging the full power of XForms
for them without having to wait for Microsoft 
and Netscape.

All the best,

Sebastian


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bjoern Hoehrmann [mailto:derhoermi@gmx.net]
> Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 4:13 AM
> To: Jilani, Rashid
> Cc: 'www-forms@w3.org'
> Subject: Re: NetScape/IE
> 
> 
> * Jilani, Rashid wrote:
> >Hi: Can any one inform me what are the stand of NetSacpe and 
> IE on XForms.
> >Are they planning to support it for their nexr future release?
> 
> My personal opinion is that this is __very__ unlikely, especially
> because Microsoft hasn't announced XForms support [1] for IE 6 and
> Netscape will release NN6.1 very soon.
> 
> [1] There is nothing called XForms, it's just a draft...
> -- 
> Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de } 
> http://www.bjoernsworld.de
> am Badedeich 7 } Telefon: +49(0)4667/981028 { 
> http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
> 25899 Dagebüll { PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 } 
> http://www.learn.to/quote/
> 
>

Received on Friday, 3 August 2001 06:18:19 UTC