Slashdot Mirror
Trouble Brewing at the W3C?
An anonymous reader writes "A breakaway faction of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group--which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera--is threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards. WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system--an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft."
Sound to me as if someone either missed the cluetrain, was having a slow news day and decided to invent a crisis, or swallowed some Microsoft FUD without checking his facts.
From the Web Forms 2.0 draft spec:
"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. Web Forms 2.0 aims to simplify the task of transforming XForms 1.0 systems into documents that can be rendered on HTML Web browsers that do not support XForms."
The Web Forms proposal is hugely important precisely because it can be implemented for IE using a "standard library" of client-side script. It won't be quite as nice as native implementations, but it'll work. It's the first evolutionary proposal I've seen that actually makes allowance for the festering carcass of IE holding everybody else back.
a) Using CSS instead of the tag actually uses less code if you need that "font style" a lot in a page or website.
;)
b) XHTML is based of XML, therefore all XML rules (including code termination) must be met. If you've got a problem with this, go back to SGML based HTML4.01 which allows this
c) In CSS you can have a as wide as its content, use: "width: 0; overflow: visible;"
Full height-sidebars? "height: 100%;"
d) Attribute="value"s have to be completed in order to comply with XML spec, as I said earlier, SGML-based HTML4.01 is more flexible....And you forgot to close your element properly
The W3C Standards exist for a reason and many are devised by people who, lets face it, are waaaay smarter than both you and I. If you've got a problem with this, then join one of the W3C Working-Group Mailing lists and ask them yourself.
XUL and XAML are general markup languages for GUIs. And Flash is a complete runtime.
The notion that XUL and XAML are substitutes for a forms standard makes about as much sense as saying that a C compiler is a replacement for a web browser: just add a little bit of code yourself. I guess we should count our blessings that at least they aren't proposing to use Java.
XForms is specifically for forms: things you fill in and submit. XForms also has facilities for off-line filling and mailing of forms. We need a standard like that.
Having said that, I find neither XForms nor Web Forms 2.0 particulary persuasive. XForms suffers from second system effect: there is just too much of it. And Web Forms 2.0 seems like a mess; reliance on JavaScript is a no-no.
Thanks, but not thanks: everybody should go back to the drawing board. Maybe in another few years, they'll come back with something reasonable.
Since Flash lacks semantic markup, how exactly are blind users supposed to make use of my website? How can I elegantly convert DocBook (or another XML dialect) to Flash like I do for XHTML all the time? Flash causes too many problems with adaptability and accessibility.