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Mozilla, Opera Form Group to Develop Web App Specs
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software have formed a working group to develop specifications for Web applications. The new Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is working on specs for Web Forms 2.0, Web Apps 1.0 and Web Controls 1.0, among others. This is being done outside of the W3C, with the hope of getting a viable alternative to Longhorn's XAML available soon. Another reason for working outside the W3C could be the rift between Mozilla/Opera and other W3C members over what technologies Web applications solutions such be based on: Mozilla/Opera favour a backwards-compatible HTML-based standard, others are looking towards to XForms and SVG. It will be interesting to see if any other browser developers jump on board WHATWG." This story builds on our recent story concerning the group.
I think that i would be if better if konqueror/khtml people joined the group, as for
instance khtml is representing safari too.
This is being done outside of the W3C, with the hope of getting a viable alternative to Longhorn's XAML available soon
Okay, Microsoft are trying to develop some standards. If history says anything about how the web has evolved its that the users define the standard. If it works, we use it. XML works. Macromedias Flash app is a defacto standard, created outside the W3C. If it works, we use it. Suns Java is pretty popular too. A lot of stuff is created outside the W3C, it all works, if its good we install it. simple really.
Do you need a website upgrade?
The W3C has been working on this - the "creation of a new language designed specifically for Internet computing" - since their original darpa grant in in 1995. Tim-Berners Lee's web site says he still acts as an advisor to the company that's continuing that project.
Drag and drop is indeed one of the things that I think HTML should allow. We'll probably be extending HTML to allow for drag and drop in WHATWG.
:-)
Anything else?
"It will be interesting to see if any other browser developers jump on board WHATWG."
I think "WTF" would be a more appropriate acronym.
And we can all be safe to say that we wont be seeing IE join in on Opera and Mozilla's pillow casing party.
Personally, this entire little development sounds like a waste of resources that could be better spent on tuning and promoting their products. Seeing how widely adopted Mozilla's XUL architecture is, I think the Mozilla group would be better off getting Firefox up to speed and getting the rest of their projects in order before running about trying to cop some moves here.
That's not to say that I don't support Mozilla and Opera but, being a Web Developer for the last 6 years and a Internet Services Architect for the last 3, I can tell you right now that the last thing both Web Developers and Browser Developers need are more languages and competing standards. We are at a point of language saturation as never before and most these new languages are aimed at online services. While this may seem to be a great thing because choice is generally good, we have too many choices and most developers I know can only get 2-3 languages down to an expert level. So this development would most likely be ignored on a professional inplementation level while more standardized and familiar languages/feature sets would be used. In the end, it would most likely be a waste of time and resources for both Mozilla and Opera who should focus (IMO) on getting DOM Level 3/XSLT/CSS/SVG upto snuff and better integrated with the existing standards before going off on their own.
Case in point: Right now, I'm making a web service that has a native XML interface, which then gets (optionally) rendered via an XSLT interface with a 100% CSS defined GUI and the UI logic handled via DOM level 2 and Javascript. The applicational logic is handled via a PHP portal/middleware broker to the stored Postgres pgSQL database views/routines.
Got all that? I argued strongly with my client against using soch a complex interface architecture, but it was writtten in stone and they held firm and were willibg to pay for it -- so they got it. But, I can't count all the possible points of failure on one hand. Does it break in the database? maybe the XML? The PHP? Maybe the XSLT or maybe it's just the CSS or the Javascript.
The fact that Firefox requires a seperate CSS-stylesheet doesn't help matters, but I opted out of Firefox support to Support Gecko variants (safari) as well as Mozilla and IE -- but not Opera. Not proving support for certain browsers was a definite plus here -- since it's an intranet app meant to be used via VPN and not accesable to the public. But I shudder to think at the amount of CSS-stylesheets and JS includes that would be required to support this as a public service.
What we need right now is better integration/platform independence and the browser would be the common ground here. So instead of running off on their own and adding more languages/points of failure, maybe they could figure out a new means of getting everything to work together a bit better.
A good start would be getting Opera/Mozilla/Firefox all on the same page in terms of CSS/DOM level 3 compatability, that would be a lot more meaningful to me than a competing standard.
And thus ends my rant.
So instead of a "monolithic browser" you want a "monolithic runtime" that takes too long to update, lacks basic features, and leaves the rest of you at the mercy of a few companies who are more or less radical and "open", depending on the day of the week?
I really don't understand the difference between your VM idea and the browser of today, except that you would use XForms as the core instead of HTML. Different tags, same problems.
The more I read your VM proposal the less I understand it, unfortunately. I guess I need to see a more formal proposal to really understand what it means.