Re: XForms product news

In a message dated 07/04/2004 12:11:31 GMT Daylight Time, 
mseaborne@origoservices.com writes:

> Hi,
> 
> As some of you know the company I work for, Origo Services (b-to-b, XML
> standards body for UK Life Insurance) ran a one day conference on XForms
> yesterday.
> 
> I just wanted to quickly mention one or two product related things were
> mentioned that I thought might be of general interest.
> 
> Firstly, David Boloker, IBM's CTO of Emerging Technologies told us that IBM
> has begun work on implementing XForms native in Mozilla (though he did say
> that it will take a _really_ long time to do). David also mentioned that
> they are also working on XForms  support in WebSphere Portal Server, Lotus
> Workplace and Pervasive Computing.
> 
> Secondly, Novell demo'ed an IE plug-in that they are working on. No release
> date was given, but we were told that it will be a free download when it is
> ready.
> 
> All the best
> 
> Mark
> 

Mark,

A practical question. Do you envisage that all XForms plugins for Internet 
Explorer will be equal?

What is the benefit for the XForms community of having several viewers? I can 
see a benefit if one particular viewer is visibly substandard but if one 
assumes the existence of a complete and conforming XForms viewer for Internet 
Explorer what is the need for another?

I can see a much more evident gap in the market for XForms design tools than 
in the market for XForms viewers. A couple of competent, usable XForms design 
tools are now around but, in my view at least, have some distance to go to 
catch up with Microsoft's InfoPath and Adobe's XML/PDF Designer as XML-based forms
 design tools. I am not knocking the XForms design tools but Microsoft and 
Adobe are not beginners at the job of creating good tools. And that experience 
shows.

Thoughts?

Andrew Watt