Re: XForms product news

Andrew,

On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 13:46, AndrewWatt2001@aol.com wrote:

> 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?

"Free" plugins available on the web are most of the time free as free
bear and not as free speech without long term commitment from their
author. That means that the companies that publish them can change their
mind without any prior notice and either remove them or decide to make
them paywares.

IMO, a company that would roll out a big and strategic application with
many forms involved would take a big risk to rely on only one
implementation available for free, even if that implementation is fully
conform to the rec.

> 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?

The number one reason I see among my customer for not using XForms at
the moment is the lack of plugins working on each of the major browsers
and the lack of design tools comes only in second position.

In other words, the main blocking point for the adoption of XForms is
still browser support and I am afraid the situation is not likely to
change in the short term :-( ...

My 0.02 Euros,

Eric
> 
> Andrew Watt
-- 
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Received on Wednesday, 7 April 2004 08:20:02 UTC