RE: AJAX vs. Xforms

People don't want to install plug-ins. Heck, I work with XForms day-in day-out and I don't want to bother installing XForms plug-ins. I think I tried installing Novell's processor once, got stymied by it not working with Windows XP SP2, and gave up. Not worth the effort involved, and I'm an XForms developer!

 

Flash provides a capability that is unavailable in HTML. You can't do movies and animation in HTML. It still took years for Flash to really take off and get to where it is now where authors can just depend on it being installed, and can make web sites based on it. And even still, most web sites that use Flash have an equivalent non-Flash version.

 

Forms, on the other hand, already exist, and can be made quite slick with some JavaScript. You don't need some external plug-in to do forms. XForms offers nothing compelling for end users that will push them to install a plug-in. Form authors are the people that benefit from XForms, not end users. Developers are supposed to absorb the burdens imposed by new technologies, not users!

 

XForms needs to be completely invisible to end-users, or it will be too annoying to ever take off.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: www-forms-request@w3.org [mailto:www-forms-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Vincent Berger
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 12:03 PM
To: Elliotte Harold
Cc: www-forms@w3.org
Subject: Re: AJAX vs. Xforms

 

Le lundi 31 octobre 2005 à 06:58 -0500, Elliotte Harold a écrit : 

 
Vincent Berger wrote:
 
> May be, your tennis is better than your google search for "xforms 
> plugins"  :-)
> Are you serious ?
 
Abso-fucking-lutely.
 
Plugins that aren't installed on users' desktops are as useful to a web 
developer as food sitting on an Albertson's shelf in Arizona is to a 
starving person in Kashmir.


People are not so stupid. They know how to install plugins.