Re: Is or isn't scripting needed, was RE: XForms vs. Web Forms

First, apologies to Christopher Goodrich for implying that plug-ins were  
always easy enough to use and install to be an acceptable option.  The  
references to Macromedia, etc., were mine and had nothing to do with the  
article's content.  I haven't stood help desk duty for over 35 years, and  
back then I was helping people debug FORTRAN programs.  I guess I'm a  
little out of touch :)

But I have to ask the question: Isn't a well-designed, open-source plug-in  
an acceptable method for providing browser functionality for technologies  
not available when the browser was released?  I may have chosen bad  
examples due to my own ignorance, but it seems to me that bad examples  
don't necessarily invalidate an assertion.  And there appear to be XForms  
plug-ins available for every major browser.

Second, the more I follow this discussion, the more confused I get.  WF2  
is supposed to be backward compatible, yet to use its full functionality,  
you need a new browser or yet another plug-in?  How is that preferable to  
a clean, fresh XForms implementation?  Especially considering that any  
"new browser" will always support the old code anyway?

And what use is it to be able to display a form and not have the  
client-side validation work properly?  If you can't be sure a form  
submission will come in with the same level of validation every time, you  
then must code your server side either to test for the presence of the  
validation facilities in the browser (more code) or not trust the client  
side validations and repeat them at the server side (more code, but  
required anyway if the above test fails).

I'm sorry, but the more I hear about WF2 the less I like it.

Eric S. Fisher

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:41:25 +0100, Anne van Kesteren  
<fora@annevankesteren.nl> wrote:

>
> John Boyer wrote:
>> This is curious to me. If not with a pile of javascript, then can you
>> explain how else the new attributes and their values will be given
>> meaning other than by a browser upgrade?
>
> I thought we were comparing "native implementations". If you want to  
> implement WF2 in a curernt browser, then yes, you need scripting.  
> However, you could create a plugin as well, as is done for XForms.
>
>
>> Without scripting, isn't it the case that the WHAT-WG is no more  
>> compatible with IE and other existing browsers than XForms?
>
> Not really. Where IE would download a page using XForms embedded in  
> XHTML it would show a page using WF2 in HTML. Also, the form can still  
> be submitted, but client-side validation is lost.
>
>
>> With scripting, isn't it true that existing browsers can be used for
>> the WHAT-WG proposal?  But isn't it also true that with scripting the
>> existing browsers can be used to support XForms?
>
> The first is true. The second is false. IE doesn't support the  
> 'application/xhtml+xml' namespace, for example.
>
>



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Received on Wednesday, 16 March 2005 20:31:41 UTC