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

Eric,

I think you just used plug-ins that for one reason or another made me
grind my teeth.  I was not in any way implying that all plug-ins are
bad, merely that the inclusion of those particular plug-ins with Xforms
could possibly tarnish the reputation of the Xforms plug-in in certain
circles.

For my purposes, the choice between inclusion of a plug-in vs. script is
academic.  I'll force my users to use the plug-in every time (Corporate
environments lend themselves to this sort of mob behavior).  I'll even
enjoy forcing it down people's throats if it will save me the pain of
scripting.

Your other questions I'll leave to the others to handle, especially
since I had similar questions, but didn't get around to asking them.

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 Eric S. Fisher
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 1:31 PM
To: www-forms@w3.org
Subject: 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 20:49:44 UTC