Welcome to the Real-World; The Future of XForms

  My statement that "I'm going to add XForms
support (sanitized and cleaned-up)" to Luxor sparked
some responses about my "arrogance". How dare I to
break the XForms 1.0 spec without consulting the
XForms committee? What about my responsibility to the
XForms community?

  As others might be interested to hear my position
too I will share it out in the open:

I consider XForms 1.0 a draft even though W3C might
call it a recommendation. Think about it as XForms
0.1. 

I will clean-up XForms and I hope and I encourage
others do it too. Once real working XForms
browsers/engines are out in the wild and in use the
"real" XForms leaders can get together and hammer out
a XForms 1.0 interop spec (call it XForms 2.0 or
whatever).

   So if you have the good of the XForms community at
heart and want to be taken serious, you better get
an XForms browser/engine up and running or otherwise
please step aside as a spec from a bunch of academics
hardly will take off.   

  To wrap it up, I don't believe in pre-mature
standardization. Isn't it ironic that Tim Berners-Lee,
himself, now heads an army of comittees that say no,
no, no. Like in his old days at CERN? 

  As the private answers to my mini-critique prove you
can discuss endlessly about pro and cons of various
minor features. But once you tell these know-it-alls
to show off an open-source implementation they start
running. Talk is cheap. If you're serious, show me the
code.

  And please don't wait for miracles as Microsoft,
IBM, Adobe or whatever industry giant won't do they
coding for you. Remember, Microsoft just embraced and
extented HTML because its core business was threatened
by a startup, that is, Netscape.

  - Gerald

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Received on Thursday, 10 April 2003 14:56:40 UTC