Re: Welcome to the Real-World; The Future of XForms

Gerald,

Comments/responses inline below.

In a message dated 10/04/2003 20:09:24 GMT Daylight Time, luxorxul@yahoo.ca 
writes:


> My statement that "I'm going to add XForms
> support (sanitized and cleaned-up)" to Luxor sparked
> some responses about my "arrogance".

<grin/> Join the club!

See, for example,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2002Nov/0032.html 

 How dare I to > break the XForms 1.0 spec without consulting the
> XForms committee? 

Sounds like you touched a raw nerve! :)

What about my responsibility to the > XForms community?

On that point I tend to agree with those who contacted you.

It would be useful for you to post your specific suggestions and criticisms 
publicly, ideally including posting to www-forms-editor as well as to 
www-forms and xforms@yahoogroups.com.

That at least ensures that the XForms commmunity can think about how 
pertinent they may be.

> 
>   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. 

Well it is only a Candidate Recommendation at the present time. So, in theory 
at least, it can all be thrown away and a fresh start / significant revision 
made. However, as you have likely experienced you can expect fairly serious 
push back from certain quarters if you seriously question the status quo.

> 
> 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).

Mm. What, more specifically, do you have in mind?

Or to put the question another way what do you perceive as the most serious 
flaws of the current version?

> 
>    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.   
> 

Well, there are several implementations / prototype implementations around.

>   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. 

Um, IBM has just released an XForms prototype. And Oracle has one in the 
pipeline too, I understand. And Novell has a prototype implementation.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xmlforms
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ (see the Implementations section for general 
info)

So, although I don't see XForms as by any means flawless, it does - at least 
on the desktop seem to be implementable.

Andrew Watt

Remember, Microsoft just embraced and
> extented HTML because its core business was threatened
> by a startup, that is, Netscape.
>