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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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

[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

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

[Echnin]

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

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.

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?

[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

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