RE: XForms Myths Exposed - By Ian Hixie (Opera)

Hi Christopher,
	theres a good chance X-Forms will be useful to you here,
	and you can always use something like Chiba to get across the 
board browser compatibility now rather than wait for the browsers to catch up.
where you might come unstuck is the actual form your XML takes.
although in theory Xforms can load and edit ANY XML, in practice it can be a 
bit troublesome (especially with xforms 1.0) 1.1 seems to fix a lot of issues 
here though but I don't have any actual experience with 1.1 so I cant say for 
sure.
If you have to add/remove attributes to nodes for example and you are using 
some engine that doesn't support script(like chiba) then you just cant.
on the other hand if you are only adding/removing/editing elements, and 
editing attributes then you might save a lot of time by using xforms.  its not 
always easy to get a UI experience that is as clean as it could be with a 
custom coded html form either, but its usually good enough.

hope that helps, and my intention is not to put you off. I hope the more 
people dive in and try real world apps with x-forms the more the powers that 
be might listen and address the issues.

I would certainly choose Xforms over infopath!

Cheers
Jason.


Date sent:      	Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:04:52 -0700
From:           	"Goodrich, Christopher Michael" 
<cmgoodr@sandia.gov>
To:             	www-forms@w3.org
Subject:        	RE: XForms Myths Exposed - By Ian Hixie (Opera)
Forwarded by:   	www-forms@w3.org
Date forwarded: 	Fri, 11 Mar 2005 15:05:36 +0000

> 
> Hi all.
> 
> I've been "lurking" on the list for quite some time now because I'm
> wanting to find another way to interface with my xml files that display
> on my web pages.  The reason I've been just sitting tight is primarily
> because implementing something new here takes a while, and I don't have
> the time to spare on something that isn't going to work with our
> currently implemented technology.  I'm hoping the technology will get
> there (we have adopted Mozilla/Firefox on some platforms), but it's not
> there yet.
> 
> The main reason I'm piping up now is this Myth list leaves me with
> really cold feet, but I'm not ready to just give up yet.  Since I have
> not actually sat down to code anything in xforms yet, can someone give
> me a laymans explanation of what this means?  I might have to get
> technical with the details of what I'm trying to do, but the simple
> explanation is I'd like a web-based interface to update, add, and delete
> records in a custom xml file residing on our corporate web server that
> has access restrictions.  Currently we are using Infopath in the Office
> 2003 suite to do this (I hate this option).  So can anyone explain if
> these myths seem to bring my hopes crashing down, or whether I should
> just hang on? 
> 
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Christopher M Goodrich A+
> Corporate Computing Help Desk
> Sandia National Laboratories
> Science Applications International Corporation
> cmgoodr@sandia.gov
> (505) 284-4797 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-forms-request@w3.org [mailto:www-forms-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Ian Hickson
> Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 7:29 AM
> To: jason
> Cc: www-forms@w3.org
> Subject: RE: XForms Myths Exposed - By Ian Hixie (Opera)
> 
> 
> On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, jason wrote:
> >
> > I think he makes some pretty reasonable points actually.
> 
> Heh, thanks.
> 
> > one thing I would say in XForms favour is that if you are using it for
> 
> > x-platform compatibility, then as long as you stick to xforms (ie dont
> 
> > use
> > script) then your app will run on any x-forms compatible renderer 
> > (whethere is visually based or something else!) you just cant do that 
> > with script. you would need a different version of the script for each
> 
> > target.
> 
> You shouldn't. While there may be some bugs in browsers that force you
> to have slightly different code (like there might be bugs in an XPath
> implementation that force you to do different XPath for different UAs),
> by and large scripts should work the same on all UAs.
> 
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 11 March 2005 23:20:44 UTC