RE: How you can help: Interoperability (The Knowing - Doing Gap)

Guillermo

I agree that there appear to be a significant number of mostly small differences between the three implementations we users have been asked to work with. By ignoring presentation I have found that I can get most of a simple form to work in both the Novell and X-Smiles browsers. I have tried to use the FormsPlayer IE plugin too, but, it is more work to use, and maybe not yet as mature as the others. If I had more time, I think I would try to author one form, and then run it through different XSLT stylesheets to cater for the differing presentation foibles of each implementation.

To be fair, I think things will improve as the products grow. They are all still at quite early stages of development, and have been built against a moving target. All things considered they do work pretty well already. So on the whole I am encouraged.

All the best

Mark Seaborne


-----Original Message-----
From: Guillermo Menéndez [mailto:gmcorral@terra.es]
Sent: 27 November 2002 16:18
To: www-forms@w3.org
Subject: RE: How you can help: Interoperability (The Knowing - Doing Gap)


Hello all,
First of all sorry for my english. I´m a student who is working on his end of grade project and I decided a couple of months ago to make the part based in web forms with xForms. Most of this forms are made using as reference X-Smiles 0.6(I mean, testing them on X-Smiles 0.6), and they work correctly on it, but when I needed to use some features that were not available in that version I started working with Novell's XForms Preview and, besides the obligatory changes due to shifting from the February WD sintax to the CR one, I had to modify a great part of the code in order to adapt the forms to this second implementation.
The main reason of this is that X-Smiles supports html content within the body part of the document, such as paragraphs, tables, etc, but Novell Xforms does not, and it structures all the content with the <group> element and the help of stylesheets. Maybe this issue hasn't much to do with xForms or with this mailing list, but I thought it was an important difference between both implementations.
I encountered other minor differences such as including the <output> element inside a <label>, wich only woks on Novell XForms Preview, or in the way of declaring an external stylesheet. I also had problems in using external instances with Novell XForms, due to the namespaces, but maybe I´m wrong at this point.

I tried to make a little silly example that works on both implementations and I uploaded it to this location :
http://www.geocities.com/gmcorral2002 
the first two examples are the same form made expressely for Novell and for X-Smiles, and the third example is an attempt to make it work on both implementations.

Well I'm not sure if this can help for anything, but I hope it can be a little useful.

Guillermo Menéndez

Received on Friday, 29 November 2002 03:00:00 UTC