Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Starts Work On XForms
AnamanFan writes "The Mozilla Foundation, with Novell and IBM, announced the formation to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation on the Mozilla platform. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the W3C. The project enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT. Is this one step away from the corporate world's dependence on ActiveX? We can only hope."
When IE development stopped it really hampered new development. It's now clear that longhorn will be introducing a whole pile of new proprietary offerings with its new browser to facilitate the much needed improvement in web apps. But with details locked up, presumably until release, I'm very glad that other browsers are now looking ahead in their own direction. With any luck Microsoft will be pressured into supporting XForms. Heck, I'd settle for a 3rd party plugin. But anything to give developers a solid full-featured cross-platform solution. We can't let ourselves continue to be locked into microsoft products. It's unhealthy :)
Phew.. I was starting to get really scared that the web would be developing at the speed of Macromedia and Sun for the next while. This really is something big and new we can look forward to as well.
I wonder what kind of working timeline they have. With those big corporate spenders helping out, I'd like to think they are really pushing forward at a good pace.
You also no longer define the type of formelement (radiobutton, selectboxes,...) the browsing tool chooses the most apropriate system. For graphical browsers radiobuttons may be cool, but for screen readers it may read the form like "choose one of the following", and for small display devices a dropdown-menu maybe better as 2 radio buttons plus their label takes up too much screen space.
Sounds great in theory, but in practice the design monkeys are going to insist on their chosen control type be implemented as they want it. I've even had an argument where the designers wanted a bunch of check boxes with validation control to ensure only one could be ticked at a time, i.e. functionally equivalent to a group of radio buttons. Took a lot of time to convince them to change as they felt the checkboxes looked better than the radio buttons.