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

"Robin Berjon" <robin.berjon@expway.fr> wrote in message 
news:4238C013.7070409@expway.fr...
> (especially given how buggy IE's implementation of Ecmascript is).

JScript has one major bug - (0.07).toFixed(1), other than that, it's 
extremely good and conformant. (especially as it's actually quite hard to 
have conformance problems in ES).  You certainly can't call it buggy.

> On the other hand I think one could get 80%ish compliance (or perhaps in 
> fact more) with WF2 by hacking through a rainy week-end.

Almost certainly not, some things are impossible, some things are in effect 
impossible simply because of them not-scaling to normal sized documents (and 
this includes things like the repeat model, which currently requires 
iterating over every element in the document before the load even fires, 
completely impractical)  If it was true, it shows how completely irrelevant 
these enhancements are, if it's 2 days of scripting to get them to work in 
IE, we certainly don't need the new features, they're obviously bog standard 
things we have already.

>> I'm sorry, but the more I hear about WF2 the less I like it.
>
> Have you read it? I remember seeing an early draft back when XForms was 
> being voted on and not thinking much good about it, but in its current 
> state I find that it is a high-quality specification that does a large 
> part of what people want.

Very few of the issues raised on the list have been addressed, especially 
important ones where the fact it doesn't fall back in legacy browsers have 
gone completely ignored, whilst some things are well specified, they're not 
implementable within the constraints given (in script/behaviours in IE) and 
the Working Group consists of one person who's obviously beginning to 
struggle to keep up and actually get a call for implementations any time 
soon.

> But I'm starting to get sick and tired of seeing good people that share 
> the same fundamental goals and good intentions waste time bickering about 
> competing specs while the RAND and proprietary scourge takes over the 
> world, or prepares to.

The reason we have competing specs I think, is that most people don't 
actually want any of this stuff, we don't _need_ a new forms model, we can 
rub along fine with what we've got, especially when declaritive languages 
are so much harder to understand than scripting ones for most web 
application developers.

> We've got on one side XForms, which is cool, good in many ways, but that a 
> non-neglible part of our community rejects and on the other WF2 which has 
> fewer features but has support from said non-negligible part of this one 
> same community.

I've seen very, very little support for either WF2 or XForms from developers 
anywhere, we don't need either forms technology, spending time on either of 
them inside the current user agents just seems a waste of precious 
developers time.  Plug-ins are different, I have much more support of doing 
it in these, they're done by different companies, producing added-value for 
their customers, they're customers aren't web-developers though, they have 
different needs, and can address different needs.  Here XForms has much more 
value than WF2, but I'm still not completely sure either groups have really 
captured use cases from web-developers - WF2 has yet to publish a single use 
case for example.

Jim.

Received on Sunday, 20 March 2005 16:34:58 UTC