RE: Proposal for Extensions to HTML4

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, David E. Cleary wrote:
>
> First, calling it XForms Basic when the specification itself states that
> it is not a subset of Xforms and the W3C already has an XForms Basic is
> not only misleading, but some could say pretty sleazy.

The name is temporary and will probably change at some point. The current
name was a suggestion by Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer (one of the members of
the working group).

Note that the official W3C XForms 1.0 Basic Profile draft has, as I
understand it, no serious backing. It consists of XForms with extremely
little removed; for example XPath, XML Events and even basic XSchema are
still required. It thus does not really address the market that "Basic"
specs usually address.


> Second, your claim that Xforms is not for use over the World Wide Web is
> completely ridiculous.

I base this claim directly on statements made by XForms working group
members and the people implementing (and not implementing) XForms. No Web
browser vendor has indicated any interest in implementing XForms, for
reasons that are relatively well documented, e.g. in:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2003Sep/0006.html
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2003Sep/0017.html

...and those people with whom I have had discussions with respect to the
use of XForms have indicated to me that they did not expect to be serving
XForms documents directly over HTTP. Most XForms demonstrations I have
seen have been either local files editing local files, or remote XForms
translated into HTML+JavaScript on the fly before hitting the client.
Most use cases I have been given consist of intranet applications or
dedicated thin clients.


> While you are certainly free to create and implement whatever technology
> you like, it is hard to take this document seriously giving the overtly
> political statements made in the first few paragraphs.

I would hope that "political statements" would not affect your judgement
of a technology's worthiness. The two issues are rather distinct.

I still value your opinion and would be interested in your feedback on the
content of the specification.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
U+1047E                                         /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 5 December 2003 09:44:24 UTC