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."

Comments

Competing standards

[thephotoman]

I'm all for choice when it comes to how to do things, but standards should be, well, standard. The point of such arbitrary standards is lost if the bodies that are supposed to arbitrate the mechanisms are squabbling.

However, given the members of the W3C that are in the breakaway faction, it gives me pause to think that the only non-participating engine coder on the list is Microsoft. It makes me think that perhaps the standard that our favorite punching bag monopoly is trying to do something with the web forum standards that the others aren't liking.

Of course, this is without R-ing the FA, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Re:Competing standards

[Wesley Felter]

You make a good point. I looked at the XForms spec, and it was written by IBM, Xerox, Adobe, SAP, Novell, Sun, et al. What do these companies have in common? None of them develop major Web browsers.

Re:Competing standards

[Spy der Mann]

None of them develop major Web browsers.

Furthermore, none of them MAKE WEBSITES FOR A LIVING. They don't have to worry about a website running in this or that browser ("hey, just make it have a javavm and we're all set"), and they certainly don't have to cope with pointy-haired bosses wanting to move this graphic here or there.

"What do you mean it can't be done?"
"The browsers do not support the specs, sir."
"You're fired!"

Oh, you bet they'd DO support webforms if they had to experience the pain of web designing.

In my humble opinion...

[astebbin]

... this'll all turn out just like Beta vs. VHS with some initial worriement that resolves itself with one set of standards beating down the other and becoming the norm. As for the possible role of Microsoft... whoever gets Bill Gates on their team, wins.

Give me a break...

[ThePatrioticFuck]

I just love how :

"Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera--is
threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards."

suddenly becomes Microsoft's fault :

"an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft."

Geezus guys, feeling a little insecure are we?

What's the point?

[Khuffie]

No matter what the 'winner' is, people will still be running older browsers that don't support the new technology. So, as a 'just in case' scenario, application developers will still be using whatever programming language they're coding in to do the verification and whatever it is they need in the background. Unless I'm missing a magical thing that XForms, XAML and Web Forms 2.0 would be doing?

Re:You know the saying -

[Zocalo]

So many standards indeed. According to the article "The W3C is saying the answer is XForms. Microsoft is saying it's XAML. Macromedia is saying it's Flash MX. And Mozilla [along with Opera and Apple] is saying it's XUL."

OK. Lovely. It looks like the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator browser war is back with a vengeance, only with some new players. I think it's safe to say that Macromedia isn't going to get its way, and I hope we've all learnt our lessons about Microsoft's bait and switch tactics with standards by now. Yeah, right! I'm betting Microsoft will go with XAML, and everyone else will go with XUL only to add XAML support later because Microsoft will refuse to support XUL. <Sigh> It's going to be CSS and browser specific hacks all over again, isn't it?

Like saying...

[ET_Fleshy]

FTA:

"The XForms group tried to do the right thing, but as a result they dropped backwards compatibility" ... "And I think that's very unfortunate, because trying to replace a few hundred million browsers is a rather hard thing to do, and I don't think XForms is 10 times better."

Seams comparable to gas stations "revolutionizing" the way fuel is pumped into cars with a new fuel nozzle. The only catch, it doesn't work with any of the gas tanks installed in cars today, nor are there any cars planned to support the system in the near future. "...however we believe our system is so much better that the world should conform to us."

Now while I am one who loves standardization, the idea that you can impose standards that render all known browsers obsolete is ridiculous. Most people can't figure out how to update their computer with security patches much less download a whole new browser gasp... it'll never happen. The industry will not just leave 90% of their customers out in the cold because they cannot support the new forms. On another note, I am glad to see that some people are not affraid to stick up for the average person and challenge the W3C's authority.

Re:Like saying...

[Eil]

I was about to disagree with you, but as I was finishing up my last witty jab at your argument, I realized that you were right... but for the wrong reasons.

Case study: Despite being proprietary and not bundled with any operating system or browser at the time, Flash took off quickly, and well before a significant portion of the world's population was able to browse the web. But upon seeing site after site that required Flash because of all the cool things it could do, people muddled their way through getting it onto their computers until it was popular enough that they didn't have to. Specifically, they didn't have to bring their computer into their dealer and say, "Excuse me, could you upgrade my gas tank, err, web browser please?" They just downloaded the software, hit "OK" and went to town.

Now, the real reason standards-based web forms won't catch on has nothing to do with this, and more to do with that fact that 95% of the browser market won't have an upgrade available. Microsft refuses to make its browser compatible with standards that are going on a full decade old. Even if they would just fix the bugs that plague the current implementation of what they SAY they support, web designers would offer endless gratitude, but MS won't even do that much for their users.

What they will instead do is this: Release the next version of Windows (Longhorn) with IE 7, an integrated web browser containing all of the bells and whistles that made Firefox semi-popular, including tabbed browsing and easy-to-write extensions, and improved web standards support. Also thrown in will probably be a new forms implementation. After the new OS has been out for 3 or 4 months, MS will release IE 6.9 or so for XP and Mac OS X that's really just IE 7 with a couple of key features (like tabbed browsing) removed.

Users will forget that Firefox ever existed because the new IE will do basically everything that Firefox did only faster. There will no longer be a big incentive to switch, even if it is relatively painless. IE will do what they need it to, and it's already there, so they'll use it. There's even a good chance that the new IEs will break many websites, but hardly anyone will complain. After all, people forgot pretty quickly when XP and it's SP2 broke hundreds of legacy applications, they certainly won't complain about websites which can be easily fixed overnight.

Once IEs 6.9 and 7 take over the lion's share of the browser market, web sites will host tutorials on how to use the new IE features (including MS Forms) and web developers will quickly adopt them in their own applications. The only catch is that many of these new IE features (such as the new forms) will be difficult or impossible to clone by third parties like Mozilla and Opera. These browsers that hold the minority in market share will be ignored by web application developers just like they are today because "everybody uses IE."

And Microsoft will have won the browser war again.

Re:What's the difference??

[ArmchairGenius]

Yeah the article was a bit confusing on the details, but I think that summary is accurate.

In addition to those two, there are other "standards" out there made by different proprietary makers. Microsoft has XAML, Macromedia has Flash MX, and Mozilla has XUL....

It sounds like the splinter faction is concerned about the lack of backward compatibility in XForms, i.e., it wouldn't be supported by their browsers and would probably require a plug-in.

Sense no current browser supports Xforms, this group figures that Microsoft won't implement it and instead use its XAML form specification. And since IE has over 90% of the market, that would make Xforms essentially irrelevant. XAML would become the defacto standard, and the spliter group's products (alternative browsers to IE) would not be able to implement the proprietary XAML standard. This would effectively lock thei products out of any corporate market that utilized form technology.

So it is a pretty big deal, and it makes sense that the splinter group members are concerned enough to take this action.

Re:w3c sucks

[handslikesnakes]

Let's see here...

1. eliminating the exaggeration eliminates your point
2. so use HTML instead of XHTML
3. you're wrong
4. see 2.

Re:What's the difference??

[fm6]

I haven't RTFAed, myself, but from what I've read elsewhere, you have it right.

Not a clear winner? Depends on who you are. If you want more powerful forms applications, but don't think that XForms will be widely implemented before the next Ice Age, then Web Forms is the clear winner. If you want a nice clean, well-specified, easy to implement forms specification, XForms is the clear winner. And if you don't care...

This is your typical W3C specification hassle. The W3C keeps grinding out really detailed new specifications, but seems totally indifferent to the fact that that these specs take forever to get implemented in the real world, if they ever do. It's not as bad as it used to be, since everbody except Microsoft seems to be on the standards bandwagon. (Netscape used to be militantly indifferent to standards.) But unfortunately, Microsoft still has 95+% of the browser market.

Re:Wait a minute...

[PepeGSay]

You forgot number 3: The microsoft standard actually deals with the real world business needs for these forms.

And number 4: The "evolutionary" method is a load of crap that has been tried before (in essence, and in a non-published/standardized way)by people such as myself and it always sucks eggs once implemented for anything more than posting porn to a bit torrent tracker.

It is not a no brainer. There is far more going on that the micrsoft idea and "purists" at the W3C are dealing with. Most notable, web form generation from meta data (in a well designed way) that can generate forms for passage through XML middleware (like biztalk and some java stuff out there) without a ton of work for minor modifications and on a large scale. It is most certainly not a no-brainer.

No, YOU suck

[fm6]

Just because you can't understand the concept of separating content from presentation, doesn't mean its not useful. Here's a simple demo: get a CSS 2.0 compliant browser (Firefox 1.0 will do) and go to att.com. Do File->Print Preview. You'll actually see a different version of the page, one that leaves off the flash graphic and explicitly lists the link URLs.

Later, there will be versions for cell phones, and text-only displays. All possible because the formatting is not specified in the HTML.

If you want to spend the rest of your life hacking out table-based pages that are impossible to maintain and not viewable except on precisely the same display you tested it on, fine. But the rest of us are moving on.

Everyone against inertia

[buckhead_buddy]

Swamii paraphrased the legitimate portion of the troll: "is this a case of everybody vs. MS?"

This appears to be everybody against inertia; and Microsoft appears to be on the side of inertia. As another example, Dave Hyatt (a development lead on Apple's Safari) posted a tale about similar problems dealing with the inertia of the float handling in CSS:

Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.

I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.

Like CSS adoption, the problem with XForms is the lack of backwards compatibility with the old de-facto standards. Now with major releases coming soon (Apple in the first half of the year, Mozilla before May) it's looking like XForms can move forward by offering pretty baubles to web developers and browsers with these backwards-compatible, familiar, tweaks to encourage upgrades (and while you're at it we'll be in a better place toward Xforms 1.0 or 1.1 adoption).

Web Forms is to XForms as Windows was to OS/2

[Geof]

Web Forms is to XForms as Windows was to OS/2.

XForms is The Right Thing; Web Forms is Worse Is Better.

That's my general impression from the little I've read. XForms is loaded with coolness, but the spec is huge and it pulls in bits of other complex specifications, like XML Schema and XPath (as I recall). It's not straightforward to implement and that's a problem: witness the state of support for CSS 2.1 (let alone CSS 3).

Personally, I'm a fan of Worse is Better. We can have improved forms now and evolve towards something better. Right now, XForms promises little more than a dream.

Re:Web Forms is to XForms as Windows was to OS/2

[elbobo]

CSS 2.1 and 3 are actually not necessarily all that complex. Although for implementers there's probably a reasonable degree of complexity in covering the breadth of what's defined as possible with CSS3.

I like taking a pragmatic stance where necessary, so Worse Is Better has its place in my mind. But I don't believe this is one of those places, primarily because one of WHAT-WG's defining mantras is backwards compatibility in IE. Backwards compatibility in other browsers isn't a concern, because they have the developers of them on board. So they're specifically tailored their specs to be backwards compatible in IE. This stunts the potential considerably.

We know from what Microsoft have repeatedly said (or rather, not said) that IE will not be implementing any more of the currently standing W3C specs. IE is a dead leaf on the standards tree. So why try and drag it along for *just* *one* *more* iteration, at the expense of functionality and cleanliness across the board?

It strikes me as short sighted. All it does is delay the inevitable split between Microsoft's browser and everyone else's. It buys a couple of years, maybe. But eventually the time will come where either the other browsers give in and implement whatever technologies Microsoft have forced into de facto standards (XAML?), or they shore up their strengths, stick together, and win the web back with standards. Thus forcing Microsoft to implement the standards in order to stop the shrinking of IE's market share.

By making this next iteration work in IE (and in turn stunting it), they're actually sabotaging their position in that future inevitable split. Short sighted.

Re:You know the saying -

[TheRaven64]

Be it Java, .NET, Oracle, MsSQL, SyBase, Perl, ASP. If it's a standard we will support it.

None of the things you listed are standards, they are all products or companies.