Mozilla And Opera Team Up For Web Forms Standard

darthcamaro writes "According to an article running on Internetnews.com today, Mozilla and Opera have teamed up on a web standards proposal for Web Forms 2.0 to be presented at a W3C working group this week. One of the proposal's authors is quoted in the article as saying '... that if a backwards-compatible open-standards alternative isn't created first, then 10 years from now the de facto Web application standard will be Microsoft's Avalon and the .NET framework.'
Are Opera and Mozilla the new 'rebel alliance' in the fight against the Microsoft Empire? Should we call this chapter 'A New Hope'?"

Comments

Well... no

[rice_web]

Microsoft isn't the worst thing that's ever happened. In fact, simply creating a new web form system should be evidence that Microsoft is progressing, albeit slowly. Yes, developers should do all that is possible to prevent yet another Microsoft-dominated technology, but if Microsoft can put together a better product sooner, then take it and embrace it until a new technology comes along.

Re:Well... no

[Ender Ryan]

Are you daft, man? Microsoft "standards" may not be implementable by others, due to patents, Windows hooks in the "standard," and etc. Ever heard of ActiveX?

Microsoft's goal is to lock everyone else out, and if there's anything they're good it, it's that.

Anyway, Moz and Opera working together can only be good. It would be even better if they could work with Apple and the kHTML guys too.

Re:Well... no

[Finuvir]

The reason Opera and Mozilla want to create this quickly is so that developers don't get started with whatever Microsoft comes up with. If they start with a proprietary Microsft tecnology they won't switch to an open standard when it becomes available because Microsoft will have enough reason not to support the new standard ("Why support that? We have this; this is what everyone uses.") Then we have a whole new round of vendor lock-in. If Microsoft was unilaterally developing an open specification it would be different (though I'd prefer to see input from many organisation), but I can't see that happening any time this century.

Re:Well... no

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you daft, man? Microsoft "standards" may not be implementable by others, due to patents, Windows hooks in the "standard," and etc. Ever heard of ActiveX?

What is patented about ActiveX? Or are you referring to Eolas' patent?

Re:Well... no

[Ender Ryan]

I didn't say ActiveX was patented... Re-read my post and make sure you comprehend it before responding :P

ActiveX requires the Windows API and AFAIK i386 architecture as well, as ActiveX runs native Windows code on the client machine.

Re:Well... no

[will_die]

Microsoft product is called infopath In the market for web based forms thier are a bunch of products however the big 3, in name, would be microsoft's infopath, Macromedia's Flex, and adobe report products. With the most wide spread being abode, mainly because they purchased formflow which has wide use.

Re:Well... no

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, developers should do all that is possible to prevent yet another Microsoft-dominated technology, but if Microsoft can put together a better product sooner, then take it and embrace it until a new technology comes along.

The problem is that Microsoft's product doesn't have to be better or sooner, because most developers will take one look at the better, ready now, standardised solution that works with everything but IE, and say "very nice, but I'm waiting for Microsoft's version".

That's what a monopoly buys you.

Frankly I don't know why people say MS should be fined, split up, or forced to debundle their products. Requiring them to implement standards without incompatibilities or proprietary extensions would be a much better punishment for their monopoly abuse...

may the force be with them

[cyb97]

Well if microsoft continues along their current trackrecord their new "standard" is unlikely to be available to any competitors and will probably include so much technology lock-in that it would rule out any competition.

This is turn would hurt the customers of any company when the web turns even less standardised than it is today.

This webpage can only be viewed with microsoft technology is coming to a site near you!

Re:may the force be with them

[rice_web]

I seem to remember a few antitrust lawsuits a few years ago, which never went very well for Microsoft. If Microsoft overextends itself again, I believe that judges around the nation will be more inclined to levy the same charges. Further, judges are growing, if slowly, more computer literate, and they therefore have a greater understanding of technologies and the implications of monopolies in the marketplace (or so we should hope, after years in the courtroom).

if Microsoft's legal machine is able to fend off liberal judges, then we have a real problem. However, Microsoft is being torn to pieces by the courts, picked off bit by bit. Like a hydra, it just won't die unless it loses all its heads, but I believe it's injured to a degree that it can't venture into new technologies, dominate them, and evade the law.

Re:may the force be with them

[Singletoned]

I suspect that Microsoft would be able to cope with most fines levied against them. Even a few billion a year could be relatively easily written off, much like some of the oil companies who get fined the maximum amount per day for polluting and just consider it a pollution tax, and raise their price by a tiny amount to cover it.

Re:may the force be with them

[Anonymous Coward]

"--I'm looking for a flat in London, with a 10mbps internet connection. Anyone got any idea how to get one?"

No.

It all comes back to MSN

[Kick the Donkey]

When ever I hear a story like this, it always comes back to MSN for me. MSN was not created by Microsoft as an application for the Internet. It was created as compitition (or replacement) for the Internet. They couldn't stand the fact that people would be using something they couldn't control. Anything you let Microsoft own will be to the detriment of the society as a whole.

Re:It all comes back to MSN

[Haeleth]

MSN was not created by Microsoft as an application for the Internet. It was created as compitition (or replacement) for the Internet. They couldn't stand the fact that people would be using something they couldn't control.

Nonsense. On the "evil" scale, the MSN story barely ranks above Microsoft Bob.

If you look at the context of the time when MSN was first created, you'll find that most people were using other proprietary networks like Compuserve and AOL. That's what MSN was mimicking and trying to compete with. It was nothing to do with "replacing the Internet" - the Internet simply wasn't a big deal back then. MSN was about beating AOL. And Microsoft didn't even approach that in an abusive-monopoly way - the default Windows 95 desktop had an MSN icon, sure, but it also had AOL and Compuserve icons right next to that.

Now, it turned out that MS were too late to the party, because it was about that time that the proprietary networks started offering web access, though they kept their incompatible bulletin boards and email systems for several more years. And the rest is history - the web took off, Compuserve were bought out by AOL who themselves gradually turned into a normal ISP, and MSN ended up as a portal.

A New Hope

[Finuvir]

Surely if this chapter is A New Hope the next would be Microsoft Strikes Back and then The Return of Netscape 4? I don't think any of us want that.

Re:A New Hope

[S. Baldrick]

And we especially don't want Jar-Jar Lynx.

Re:A New Hope

[Njovich]

Yes and Bill Gates would be the father of Linus. Yuck.

Re:A New Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, might be fitting for Opera.

"This is not the style-sheet you are looking for."

Re:A New Hope

[Gr8Apes]

That would be the Return of Netscape 6, which, if we truly looked at real major releases, might be Mozilla 2.0 (due to very screwy numbering systems....)

Re:A New Hope

[Jahf]

Actually BG would be the father of either Andreesen or the Mozilla logo, either of which would be fun to watch.

No, that would've been ...

[magefile]

Episode (Netscape) IV. This is Eps. 1-3. The Phantom Menace is Longhorn (since no one knows what it is yet), The Attack of the Clones is Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox/Camino, and Episode Three? We'll just have to see.

Re:No, that would've been ...

[Echnin]

"Birth of the W3C working group"? Nah. Doesn't sound very catchy.

Yeah, right

[Fished]

At this point, all Microsoft has to do to keep things proprietary is not implement the new standard. Why should they want to implement it when they can do some crazy com/.net solution that nobody can use except on a Windows PC?

Re:Yeah, right

[endx7]

At this point, all Microsoft has to do to keep things proprietary is not implement the new standard. Why should they want to implement it when they can do some crazy com/.net solution that nobody can use except on a Windows PC?

That's where the competition comes in. A site may say, oh, you need a newer browser to view this properly. Well, Microsoft doesn't have it, so, um, sorry, use Mozilla/Firefox or Opera. As soon as people discover that IE is "broken", they become a lot more willing to switch away.

And then you have to get developers and whatnot to use your standard. An open standard has an advantage there, since -anyone- can do it without paying Microsoft.

On the other hand, IE -does- hold the upperhand, and web developers are always needing to maintain as much compatibility between browsers as possible (or, at least IE), so they might not use something most of the people can't use easily. So you definately have a point. It's not going to be easy to keep microsoft from exerting its market dominance

Re:Yeah, right

[elbobo]

If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple get in on the act, that will be enough.

This new standard isn't the same as the rest of the web. In most cases it will be targeted and used largely for web applications, not web sites.

If you build a web site you have commercial pressure to ensure that it will be viewable in as many browsers and on as many platforms as possible. You can't have system requirements on a brochure.

If you build an application, people don't by default expect it to function on all platforms and browsers. People develop applications largely for single platforms, so that sort of focus can carry over reasonably smoothly to web applications.

Having said that, if it's implemented by all the above mentioned companies/browsers, then your application will gain immediate cross platform support, with users even having a choice of browser platform within their chosen OS platform.

I'm not talking about the current generation of web applications here, the likes of web mail (Hotmail, GMail, etc). I'm talking about the next generation, where the application looks and feels much closer to what we traditionally consider to be an application. That's where these standards are going. They won't feel like the web we know now, and won't be treated in the same manner.

So Microsoft can go off and do their own thing, and that's fine. As long as the other platforms have their equivalent technology, web application developers won't be left out in the cold if they want to build cross platform applications.

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

A site may say, oh, you need a newer browser to view this properly.

As a web developer, can I just note that no company in their right minds would do this while Internet Explorer still controls 95%ish of the surfing public.

Even non-commercial websites will want to stay away from this kind of behaviour, because it's really unfriendly to their visitors and will simply turn most people away and send them off to another website that doesn't have such draconian rules.

The few people with an axe to grind against Microsoft may implement this, but all it's going to do is piss off your visitors. You have to get them to switch before you implement this kind of thing on websites.

Re:Yeah, right

[elbobo]

A site may say, oh, you need a newer browser to view this properly.

As a web developer, can I just note that no company in their right minds would do this while Internet Explorer still controls 95%ish of the surfing public.

We're not talking about web sites here, we're talking about web applications. When you go hunting for an application to do task X, and you find one but there isn't a version for your OS platform, you don't throw up your arms in rage, accusing them of crimes against humanity.

Just because we're talking about advancements in web technologies, doesn't mean we're still talking about websites as we know them now. Hell, we may as well not even be talking about web browsers.

The direction things are going in is towards "web application runtimes", like say a Gecko runtime engine that doesn't double as a web browser, but does run applications over the internet based on next generation web technologies.

If you look at what Microsoft are talking about with XAML and associated technologies, they're not talking about something implemented in a web browser or as a web browser, and largely neither are the Mozilla folks when they talk about XUL.

Re:Yeah, right

[chris_mahan]

>On the other hand, IE -does- hold the upperhand, and web developers are always needing to maintain as much compatibility between browsers as possible...

Yes, to a point. The way I look at it is that designers and developers will aim for Moz/Opera paltform, and essentially backport to IE. This means some sites will look better in Moz/Opera (which they do already) than in IE.

In droves, IE users are discovering that.

Re:Yeah, right

[Qwavel]

>> If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple get in on the act, that will be enough.

You seem a little confused about who's side Apple is on.

Apple is allowed to fight MS in digital media, but when it comes to OSX they toe the line. If they don't then MS threatens to stop making Office for the Mac. When the time comes, assuming Apple is still behaving, MS will license Avalon to Apple.

I'm happy to stake my personal credibility on the prediction that Apple will behave and MS will license Avalon to them.

OSX is one of the best things ever to happen to MS. OSX's role is to provide a safe, corporate, alternative for all the anti-MS, unix, open-source, or psuedo-rebel users. MS and Apple will get along fine.

This is not to say that OSX isn't very good.

If you want to nit-pick, let me clarify a couple of details. If MS licenses Avalon to Apple then they have to license it to the Linux companies as well (legally). But this is OK for them: they believe that it will be safer politically to exercise their monopoly over client software and the web via technology licenses. This will allow for the appearance of diversity while maintaining the monopoly that translates into huge profit margins.

Similarly, if they license Avalon to, say, Novell, they have to license it to Apple, so it isn't quite as fine grained a tool of control as MS Office is.

Tom.

Re:Yeah, right

[elbobo]

That's a fancy fairy tale you've concocted there.

I'm happy to stake my personal credibility on the prediction that Apple will behave and MS will license Avalon to them.

If I were a cruel man, I'd note that down and remind you of it in a few years time. Although you may get your chance to feel a fool sooner than that, with Apple's WWDC coming up later this month, and the potential for announcements along these lines at that event.

What rendering engine is Apple's web browser based on? KHTML, from the KDE project. Who is the lead programmer on Apple's web browser project? David Hyatt, previously from the Mozilla project, and someone whose name features prominently on the XUL specification (which is expected to play a large part in this new Web Forms 2 specification).

And even if Apple themselves don't dedicated developers to implement these new standards into KHTML, then you can bet the KDE project will, and thus Apple will inherit that functionality.

Just because Apple and Microsoft have a comfortable working relationship, doesn't mean they walk hand in hand down the same standards path.

Oh, I don't suppose you have any idea what other event is coinciding with Apple's WWDC, at the same location on the same dates? Sun's JavaOne. There's even talk of shared passes. And why is that? Because Apple never dove into .NET, they dove into Java, head first then full body following. OS X has the smoothest Java integration of any operating system on the market.

- .NET and XAML simply aren't on Apple's radar.

Do your homework.

Re:Yeah, right

[Qwavel]

The people you mentioned at Apple don't get to decide strategic direction. The techies recommend one thing, the bean counters recommend something else, and management listens to the bean counters.

I think that Apple WILL implement any new standards based web technologies that Mozilla and Opera develop. And they will do so quite loudly. MS won't mind because if you add Safari market share to Mozilla and Opera it is still tiny. But then Apple will later license Avalon.

When I said that Apple wasn't allowed to 'misbehave' I wasn't suggesting that they weren't allowed to support standards and talk the open-source talk. That is their role. An example of real misbehaving would have been to have built OSX on top of Linux.

Please do hold me to it. Qwavel is not my real name, of course, but I use it quite consistently. (Actually, I assume that anyone with too much free time on their hands could figure out my real name if they wanted.)

For the record, the issue on which we disagree seems to be whether Apple will license the Avalon technologies for inclusion in OSX.

Tom.

Re:Yeah, right

[Bombcar]

Malcolmson?

Re:Yeah, right

[Qwavel]

Yup.

Re:Yeah, right

[sipy]

The so-called "browser wars" are over. IE won... and lost.

Microsoft was not interested in "winning", per se. They just didn't want anyone *else* to win. It never was about who had the better product - only about Microsoft not losing the war. A war it misunderstood for years, joined late, and then used terrorist tactics to "win". They produced a technologically-incompatible product, disgourged massive amounts of marketing FUD about the incompatibilities that they, themselves, invented, and, finally, gave away their inferior product to commoditize the market and drive the original browser makers into the ground.

After the dust settled IE was the only browser made by a company that had not gone bankrupt. And, after your competition is obliterated, why innovate? Just keep cranking out copies of the same old cruft, and no one has anything to say about it. Stop spending your prescious billions on development, and market everyone so that they think Microsoft "did them a favor" by "watching out for their best interests", "staying free to innovate" without government intervention, and "letting the market decide". (cough) (cough) (bulls**t!) (cough)

Because Microsoft no longer cares about IE, it is now so far behind, technologically-speaking, that it is irrelevant. We wouldn't even know about Opera if it weren't for the fact that sooooooo many people have switched from the now-dead-end IE over to Opera. And Firebird is working even better than IE, even in Microsoft-only, web-based email access environments. Just try retrieving your email over the web using IE, talking to an Outlook-based email backend. IE constantly requires you to re-login, because - just like the rest of its code base - its HTTPS authentication code is full of bugs! Don't patch it, or your O/S will start crashing. Gee... thanks for the "innovations", Microsoft!
-----

Well, to Microsoft's chagrin, the market *has* decided - anyone technically literate has already downloaded Opera, one of the Mozilla versions, or has been using lynx since day one! If that weren't true, who would ever had heard of Opera? The only reason we have is that soooooo many people have switched to it!

IE is dead. Go get (download) a *real* browser. Everybody else already has. (Long live Moz!)

Re:Yeah, right

[elbobo]

Backpeddler.

I never even brought up XAML in relation to Apple. So after attacking me and saying I didn't have a grasp on Apple, you've now come out and agreed with me that Apple will implement the new standards, then tried to twist it into a "but they will *also* license Avalon later on!".

So what? who cares if they license Avalon? As long as they're supporting the standards, which is the issue which you originally attacked me on, but now agree with.

Having said that, I still say you're living in fairy land, and have no grasp of how these technologies fit together, or what Avalon really is. Apple will likely have very little interest in licensing and implementing Avalon into OS X. It still remains to be seen as to whether they're even going to support any of .NET, and I'm sure their strong bond with Java doesn't bode well on that front.

I'd be hard pressed to imagine Apple making .NET support announcements at the upcoming WWDC, considering the strong Sun and Java presence that is going to be there, what with JavaOne in the next room and all.

Re:Yeah, right

[Qwavel]

Hum. You might want to read my post a little more closely.

What I said was that you misunderstood who's side Apple is really on.

What I mean is that, regardless of what they do at their conferences and in their ads, they will do what benefits MS where it counts. I'm not suggesting anything sinister: those moves will also benefit themselves and they are a business, but they sure won't benefit the OSS movement.

In particular, they will license the technologies that allow them to support MS's direction on the web client. Their support for the standard, as deployed on the ~5% of desktops that don't use IE (correct me if this is wrong) doesn't matter. What matters is will they support MS's web client technologies (the graphics portion of which we are referring to as Avalon).

So, again, to remind you. When Apple went to OSX they had many options. One was to build OSX on Linux (but still on PPC if so desired) and thereby throw their lot in with the OSS community with Apple targetting consumers and the other Linux distro's targetting businesses. Another was to build it on a BSD and re-energize the fragmentation of the OSS community (it is well known that MS much prefers BSD to GPL).

Remember that, by law, Apple must do what is best for their shareholders, not what is best for their users or the OSS community.

Re:Yeah, right

[elbobo]

What a load of bullshit.

Re:Yeah, right

[Qwavel]

Excellent response. And the fact that it got modded up (and after the item has already moved into the 'older stuff' section) speaks volumes.

Re:Yeah, right

[Bas_Wijnen]

He hasn't been modded up, he has excellent karma which gives him a +1 bonus. I get the bonus, too, but I switched it off for this message, because this isn't anywhere near insightful ;-)

Re:Yeah, right

[Qwavel]

Ah, I didn't know that.
I see now that his comments are +1 for karma, and they have a starting score of 1.
Why the starting score of 1, I thought that all comments started at 0?

Re:Yeah, right

[Bas_Wijnen]

Logged in users start at 1, anonymous cowards start at 0.

Anyone know technical details?

[Garg]

How would this Web Forms be different from the already-standardized, but not implemented by Mozilla or Opera, XForms? (Note: not the GUI toolkit for X by the same name.) After all, the W3C page says XForms is "the next generation of Web Forms"...

The "Web Forms" name is so generic that Googling it is basically useless.

Garg

Re:Anyone know technical details?

[t482]

The specification

1.3. Relationship to XForms

This specification is in no way aimed at replacing XForms 1.0 [XForms], nor is it a subset of XForms 1.0.

XForms 1.0 is well suited for describing business logic and data constraints. Unfortunately, due to its requirements on technologies not widely supported by Web browsers, it has not been widely implemented by those browsers itself. This specification aims to simplify the task of transforming XForms 1.0 systems into documents that can be rendered on every day Web browsers.

Re:Anyone know technical details?

[bwt]

It's not aimed at replacing XForms, but it is their cop out so they don't have to implement XForms, which would require them to implement several other XMLish specs like XPath, Schema, and XML events which they see as hard. You are right that these have "not been widely implemented by those browsers".

I don't understand how adding an extra spec to learn in addition to XForms can be called a simplification. For whom? Browser implementors and presentation layer programmers. Not for businesses who have to hire people that know both specs and do more total work.

Re:Anyone know technical details?

[Brendan Eich]

Hi bwt, a couple of observations:

Technical details:

XPath is in Mozilla, has been for years. The XPath extensions needed by XForms look easy enough, although no one has signed up to do them yet.

Schema-based node validation is not in Mozilla. No one has come up with a plan yet to integrate an existing validator. T. V. Raman has suggested using Xerces wholesale, but the footprint hit seems big (1MB was a guesstimate). This is the big ticket item in the work to be done. Volunteers who know their way around Mozilla and Xerces would be ideal.

XML Events support is being implemented now, and should be done soon, provided the incomplete spec issues can be settled with the w3c, or by reasonable inference based on DOM precedent (never a safe thing with under-tested, _de jure_ standards).

Apart from these pieces, XForms needs only some generalization of Mozilla's form submission code, and the XForms processor itself. No one has signed up for these tasks yet.

Strategic analysis:

To understand how the Mozilla/Opera effort results in simplification, you should recall your own words in Mozilla's layout newsgroup, where you argued that XForms is a compelling feature in enterprise settings, not on the Web. The Mozilla/Opera effort is about the Web. Content authors for web pages do not generally need to know all the XML standards required by XForms, let alone know XForms. This is unlikely to change, given IE's dominance and the lack of free/small XForms plugins for it.

Developers who use XForms must be working for businesses and other organizations who have intranet or vertical markets in which the right plugin or extended client (Mozilla, maybe) has been deployed. Web developers who use Web Forms 2.0 and other specs resulting from the whatwg.org effort need only use next year's Opera, Mozilla, Safari, or HTC-extended IE.

Two different developer markets, two different approaches to forms. Or at least two -- Adobe and Microsoft are doing their own, non-XForms, non-HTML or -evolved-HTML forms. The proprietary approaches are more likely leak onto the web in a few years if the whatwg.org effort fails.

/be

Unfortunately...

[MarvinMouse]

No one will use it if their customers are not using Opera or Mozilla. And since the majority of standards that are eventually decided on are decided by the fact that majority of people use one browser over another. This is a meaningless move which will just complicate things more, and not really help anyone at all.

well, at least that is mho.

Never underestimate the power of the buzzword!

[wtrmute]

While it's true that people won't generally develop for a platform that isn't used, the usage of platforms isn't frozen in time. More importantly, if a developer's client happens to hear all about the new, cross-platform, next-generation Web standard that's all the rage in the technology press (like WIRED), he may just ask his CTO, "hey, how come we don't have that?" And suddenly, there's a market for this snazzy new technology. The key word (well, phrase) here is 'media coverage'.

Re:Never underestimate the power of the buzzword!

[mabhatter654]

And moxilla is free!!

as long as they make sure the smaller browsers like firefox keep up to date, then adding another browser is smaller than many windows patches!!!

Avalon and .NET vs. Macromedia Flash Remoting

[bernywork]

In all honesty, this all just sounds like Microsoft's implementation of Flash Remoting. If you don't want to work in Avalon / .Net; what we need to do is to get a hook into Flash and start working with that for forms etc.

Either way, this seems to me like it's going to be "Browser wars, round 2, FIGHT!"

Re:Avalon and .NET vs. Macromedia Flash Remoting

[Freon115]

Nonody wants this flashy thing. I'd rather use the MS or Mozilla thing.
Macromedia sells another similar product called "Flex" at $10,000 per server. Yay!

Anyway, the article author should apply for the "forum drama" award, it's really pathetic :P

give MS enough rope

[mabhatter654]

MS recent plans for .net domination put them squarely in Apple-land. It's better at this point to let MS do it's own thing 100% then to try to "compete" with them.

It would be better to keep applications like Mozilla and Opera on the table running on windows AND anything else exactly the same way. Right now in terms of number of options, the "pure" MS environment is a lame duck. It will take time for businesses to see that, but that's where the OSS alternatives can offer to "fix" those deficencies while pointing to cheaper places to run them on.

mostly though this is a good step in the right direction of defining Open Standards as it's own thing without "begging" to MS to support us. The problem with that plan is that MS will always have more $$ to spend on programmers to break the Open standards than all the other stanard members have together... It's better to do their own thing and "happen" to run on windows.