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.
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.