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

Robin Berjon wrote:
> 
> Eric S. Fisher wrote:
> 
>> 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 have yet to see a well-designed open source plugin for any of the new 
> W3C formats. In my experience the reason they don't exist is that they 
> are too hard to implement.
there's one: 'Convex' is still in preview state but uses the fairly 
stable FOSS Chiba XForms processor as its core. Unfortunately it's 
working in IE6 only currently but will likely run on Safari and Firefox 
too.

you may get it from sourceforge.net/projects/chiba/.

i wouldn't really go so far to call it well-designed but it's improving 
all the time and is already capable of running reasonably complex forms.

<snip/>

> 
> To me the way that the WHAT WG was announced felt like backstabbing but 
> I've found them afterwards to play fair with W3C and to have produced at 
> least one quality specification so let's forget about all that. What we 
> need now is mindshare, not a kindergarden for bright minds.
well spoken. too often these discussions stay fruitless - just the old 
'my ... is bigger than yours'. instead of complaining about 
inconsistencies, misses or gaps somewhere we should think of solutions.

it's easy asking why XForms can't already wash your dishes, especially 
if you haven't gone through understanding fully what has already been 
achieved by this great spec. of course, XForms is not easy if you want 
to  do complex things and it's damn hard to implement. if you don't 
watch the markup can quickly become unmaintainable. and of course there 
are still things missing that are important for many people. scripting 
or not - descriptive or not - some task stay hard. but i'm sure these 
issues can/will be cleaned up in future revisions. for the time being 
i'm convinced XForms is one of the best technologies around in this area 
and still has big potential for future growth.

sometimes i miss the 'device-independence'-aspect in all these 
plugin/native browser-discussions. aren't there things like GPRS, UMTS 
and WLAN around? what about all these PDAs and smartphones? - bright 
times for server-based XForms.

Joern

-- 
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Chibacon Lissé/Turner GbR
XForms, XML + Java
www.chibacon.de
mail: joern.turner@chibacon.de

Received on Friday, 18 March 2005 00:31:37 UTC