RE: XForms and Web Forms 2.0

This is VERY useful...........Thank you.
 
However I should point out, that the "entire British Insurance Industry" is somewhat of an over-statement.
 
Most of the insurers in the UK ONLY use XForms within the iMarket portal, which is one of several channels to market for them. iMarket is part of Polaris which publishes XML standards for General and SME Commercial insurance products only, so a smaller segment of insurance.
 
We are working with some of the insurers and brokers who state "poor usability" of the iMarkets XForms as a key issue. (This maybe just design/implementation and not necessarily a constraint of xForms.) The first time that these companies had heard of xForms was when iMarket used them, to my knowledge no UK insurer uses them outside of iMarket.
 
The real winners could be Banks, but none that I have approached will consider xForms currently.
 
I agree with Mark Birbeck, however taking a pure technology route we all know that BetaMax was better than VHS, but VHS won the standards war.
 
I also agree that the WCS needs to make a stand on ONE standard not two. Without agreement the big software vendors will have room to create their own standards (xPDF, ActionScript(Flash), XAML etc....)
 
Rightly or wrongly, IMHO developers will side with WHAT-WG (Web Form 2.0) because it is leveraging their existing skills rather than demanding a "step change" in their development skills. (Quote from Steve Pemberton I heard a couple of years ago at the UK IBM briefing on xForms).
 
 
Kind regards..............Dharmesh
 
 
 
 

________________________________

From: Lachlan Hunt [mailto:lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au]
Sent: Mon 9/4/2006 3:42 PM
To: Steven Pemberton
Cc: Dharmesh Mistry; www-forms@w3.org
Subject: Re: XForms and Web Forms 2.0



Steven Pemberton wrote:
> Whenever I give a talk on XForms, I try to give an indicative list of
> some of the companies using XForms.
>
> http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/05-26-steven-XForms/#users

But as you say on that page: "first adopters are within companies [...]
that have control over the software environment used."

In the real world, however, developers simply don't have that luxury.
The solution we develop needs to work in an environment where publishers
have absolutely no control over the user's system.

--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/