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

Is it really a Battle of the Browsers?

[Hulkster]

Ummmmm ... is the combined market share of ALL browsers outside of "Apple (aka Safari), Mozilla, and Opera" and IE even close to 1%? I.e. I don't want to be unfair (even though this is /. which is anti-MS), but is this really shaping up as a everyone-but-Microsoft vs. Microsoft battle? Or (and I did RTFA), is it more a matter of which technical standard is better?

Support Celiac Disease Research

Re:Is it really a Battle of the Browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Calculating browser market share is notoriously tricky. But still, add Apples OS market share (some 3-4%, mostly Safari) to Linuxes market share (another 3-4%, mostly Firefox) to Firefox on Windows desktops (possibly 5-10%) and you are somewhere around 15%. Opera has maybe just 1% of the desktop browser market, but here's the catch: it's rapidly becoming the default browser for handhelds (funky mobiles and PDAs), and the hype these days is that handhelds are about to become a major access point for the web - giving Opera a clout not visible in their current market share.

Moreover, the trend for IE is going downwards, and if there's anything the browser wars taught us it is that things can change very quickly. Much easier to get people to change browser than get them to change O/S or office productivity solutions.

So if this is a MS vs Everyone Else battle, it might be one of those that Everyone Else can win.

You know the saying -

[Black Parrot]

"The best thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

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?

Re:You know the saying -

[CRCulver]

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.

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.

BROWSER WARS IV - A New Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a period of civil war.
Mozilla spaceships, striking
from a hidden base, have won
their first victory against
the evil Microsoft Empire.

During the battle, Mozilla
spies managed to steal secret
plans to the Empire's
ultimate weapon, INTERNET
EXPLORER 7, an armored web
browser with enough power to
destroy an entire website.

Pursued by the Empire's
sinister agents, WHAT-WG
races home aboard its
browser, custodian of the
form standards that can save
their people and restore
freedom to the galaxy....

Re: BROWSER WARS IV - A New Hope

[flargleblarg]

May the Source be with you.

Re:BROWSER WARS IV - A New Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to read this comment properly, I needed to tilt my screen way back.

Wow...

[Quixote]

FTA:
Forms based on current Web standards are used in every Google search, every Amazon.com sale, every automated blog entry, every online tax payment, and every Web e-mail log-in.

Wow... I didn't know these all-powerful "forms" were everywhere!

Re:Wow...

[earthbound kid]

Oh yeah, read your Plato. The Forms are awesome. First of all, there's the Form of the Good, which is a lot like the sun. And everyone else is like a slave in cave. (Basically, it's just a rip-off of the Matrix. Still, it's kind of interesting.)

So, if I understand this story correctly, Microsoft feels that Forms are just properties of webpages that already exist, but the others feel that Forms are timeless, ideal webpages that we can remember experiencing before our birth. You know, like the Englebart hypertext computer.

If the standards committee is really torn between these two ways of understand the Forms, it may come down to someone like Hegel, showing that the Forms are a historically evolving entity, moving towards an inevitable conclusion.

Or, Microsoft will do whatever the hell they want in IE7 and everyone will just have to complain about it.

Either way, it's good to see more public philosophy.

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

[Zocalo]

None of them develop major Web browsers.

True enough, although Sun does produce a web browser called HotJava it's not exactly got a great market share. What they (mostly) do have in common however is that they write the backend applications that will be receiving the data *from* the forms. I guess it depends on which where your first priority lies; getting the form looking pretty or getting accurate and useful data into your backend systems.

Re:Competing standards

[Nik13]

The thing is, the forms won't be used by the browser makers nor the back end makers (well, indirectly in both cases). It's the web application developpers who do, and they'er also the ones left using whatever technologies that are available to solve the problem.

XForms wouldn't work "out of the box" for most users of my stuff, so I'm a bit hesitant. Ideally I'd have to have an alternate method of entry with "old" forms. And I just don't feel I'm gaining much, never was big on XForms (neither has been anybody it seems, since the first draft). It could become an alternative later on if browser support improves.

Flash MX? Flash is known to too many (including me) as a way to create highly annoying ads, making us use extensions like FlashBlock. It's not a good way to make your site "accessible" either. It just feels like some field (no pun intended) where Flash doesn't belong into and shouldn't extent into. Leave it for unusable site nav and annoying ads.

XUL - you hear a lot about it lately. Haven't really seen much or heard of anybody who's really done anything (web forms related) with it. And even though it's getting more popular, it doesn't work on most browsers, so I can't really consider it anyways.

XAML - are you out of your mind? Another Windows Monopoly-OS centric solution, forcing adoption of the worst browser of them all. People are starting to get the point that those kind of standards (like ActiveX) are bad. If you need LH+IE7 to use it, it's completely and absolutely out of the question. Alternative OS/browsers are left out. And I can't see the W3C drink bad microsoft kool-aid and adopt XAML as some web standard.

I've been dying for better forms for the last year mostly as I've been doing more web stuff. I haven't read much onto Web Forms 2.0 yet, but it might be an option, especially if it has good browser adoption, and by seeing the members of the WHAT-WG, you'd think it should be the case. Otherwise, XForms may be the next best bet still.

Either ways, I'll be happy when this is all resolved, and that we have something better and consistently available for all our visitors, no matter what OS or browser. (If that ever happens, that is).

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.

Wait a minute...

[Apreche]

So let me get this straight. Microsoft wants to make Xforms the standard. Everyone else wants something else to be the standard. But does it really matter which standard we choose as long as its an open one? And aren't all W3C standards open? So what's the problem? I say choose the better standard regardless of other factors.

Or is there something I'm missing here?

Re:Wait a minute...

[ekuns]

Nope, Microsoft is ignoring XForms just like everyone else. Microsoft would prefer people use XAML (from Avalon). It seems the only folks implementing XForms are not browser makers, but people developing intranet based software.

Having written forms-based code with current browsers, I agree with the XForms supporters in that scripting is a terrible way to handle form input. It just doesn't scale and you have the form in one location and the code scripting in another place, so if you change something you have two separate locations to update everything in.

But I know nothing about the XForms standard, so I can't speak intelligently about it.

Re:Wait a minute...

[overunderunderdone]

No, You didn't get it straight. Microsoft is pursuing their own proprietary solution completely separate from these two competing standards.

The fight at the W3C is over the open standard Microsoft will be ignoring and/or attempting to crush. One side (tech purists?) is advocating a completely new, technically elegant revolutionary new standard. The other side (Microsoft competitors) is worried that this totally new miracle standard, despite it's technical advantages will be crushed in the marketplace by the proprietary Microsoft "standard". They believe it will be crushed for two reasons: 1) It will take a long time to implement and then for users to adopt and Microsoft will beat it to the market with their solution and 2) It will never be supported by dominant web browser. The alternative they advocate an "evolutionary" refinement of existing standards that can actually be implemented with existing browsers using javascript. It beats Microsoft to the market, it's already supported by everybody including Microsoft(!) it's a no-brainer for web application developers trying to decide which technology to use.

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.

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 difference??

[IO ERROR]

I actually read the whole article trying to figure out the main differences between XForms and Web Forms 2.0, and this is what I come up with:

XForms:

• Doesn't require scripting
• Is not backward compatible
• Microsoft doesn't support it

Web Forms 2.0:

• Requires scripting
• Is backward compatible
• Microsoft doesn't support it

No clear winner here, yet, but I'll put my money on XForms.

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: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:What's the difference??

[leerpm]

XAML will be successful, on the Win32 platform. WinForms is going to go away. No one at MSFT is publicly admitting this yet, but there are lots of hints around. Avalon/XAML is going to be the next Win32 GUI API. But until it's well integrated with the Dev Tools, it won't really catch on. Look for XAML to really start catching momentum in 2007/2008.

Whether XAML will be successful on the web, well that is a different story..

All-powerful forms

[flargleblarg]

Kid, I've flown from one side of the galaxy to the other and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful form that controls everything.

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?

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.

Blasphemy!

[Otter]

A breakaway faction of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group...

Sorry, I'm holding out for the WHAT-WJD!

Re:Blasphemy!

[jalefkowit]

It was actually commented when the WHAT-WG was first founded that if they had thought a moment about the acronym, they'd have named it the "Web Hypertext Application Technology Task Force" instead... (go ahead, spell it out)

Storm in a teacup?

[Hortensia Patel]

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.

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:w3c sucks

[W3bbo]

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? XAML?? Flash???

[idlake]

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.

Priorities.

[Asprin]

Mozilla, Opera and Apple are allied? I don't even have to know what it's about to know which side I'm on.

Task Force

[AlexeiMachine]

The WHAT-WG is more than a working group now. I fact, they're an actual task force!

Let's hear it for the WHAT-TF

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).

Windows vs. The Browser Part Deux

[ChicagoDave]

A truly paranoid person might believe that all the way back in 1995, Microsoft saw The Internet, installed The Browser, and did Two Things. The first plan was to adopt The Browser paradigm and do it well. The second plan was to start trying to figure out how to move The Customer back to Windows. This has manifested itself in ActiveX Controls first, and now in little over a year, Longhorn with XAML.

We know what a rotting piece of tripe ActiveX was. We shall say no more on that subject.

What do we think will happen with Longhorn and XAML though? Let's speculate!

First of all, I think Longhorn will arrive without Internet Explorer technology embedded into the OS. I still think they will have some html rendering technology in the OS, but it won't be as ugly and insecure as their current Windows incarnations.

I think the .NET Framework 3.0 will be 10 times bigger than 2.0, probably close to a gig in disk space required. Within this not so tiny nut will be all of the necessary compiled components required to render a Windows application from managed code.

Then XAML. You will then be able to click on .xaml files in any browser on a Longhorn machine and control will transfer from the browser to the OS+.NET 3.0 where that xaml code will turn into managed code and render a fully functional and current Windows application.

In looking at XForms, Web Forms 2.0, and then speculating on the nature of Longhorn and XAML, and knowing many business customers as well as I do, I think Microsoft will win a large mindshare of the the Fortune 500.

After that it's all a big toss up because below the "enterprise application level" you could mix and match any of the upcoming technologies.

I almost see a splinter in two directions. The Browser will maintain all e-commerce and global corporation applications and Microsoft will still strongly support this area of development.

But where departmental and Intranet applications come in to play, Longhorn and XAML will win a ton of new development and lock out the newer web technologies.

The simple truth is that most users can't stand web applications. They don't mind doing their online banking in them, but if they're working in the treasury department of a bank, they prefer Windows applications (or office type apps built into Excel or Access).

Anyway, this all hinges on Longhorn being locked down and enormously secure. I think that's the #1 key to its and XAML's success. If MS can pull that off, the W3C people and its splinter groups have a whole other thing to worry about. If Longhorn comes out flaky and insecure, XAML will take years to gain any headway and none of this will matter.

But if I were on the W3C board, I would be hedging bets that XAML and Longhorn will succeed and start planning on how that will play in future efforts. I don't see XForms or Web Forms 2.0 competing with XAML though. Something else will have to do that.

Note: It's just speculation!

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.

Third base

[Sajma]

Q: What's the name of your working group?
A: Right.
Q: "Right" is the name of your working group?
A: No, WHAT is.
Q: What is what?
A: WHAT is the name of my working group.
Q: That's what I just aksed you.
A: No, that's what I just told you.
Q: No, no -- just tell me the name of your working group!
A: WHAT.
Q: I said, tell me the name of your working group.
A: WHAT.
Q: WHAT'S THE NAME OF YOUR WORKING GROUP, DAMMIT!?
A: Right! But my name's not Dammit...
(strangling noises)

Not War

[DeanEdwards22]

This is not a war. Many of the WHAT-WG members are also members of the W3C.

The Web Forms 2.0 specification is an extension of the existing (and antiquated) HTML Forms specification. It adds some new elements and attributes some of which are alarming omissions from the original spec. Things like standardised date and number input controls will be a boon to web developers. XForms is a quite different technology. And it may be some time before it has the penetration to be a mainstream development tool. In the meantime, Web Forms 2.0, by extending existing HTML forms functionality gives developers a familiar framework to build on.

If you are looking for any political angle then notice that Microsoft are not represented in the members list. [I can assure you that they were invited.] The WHATWG are about web applications. We need a standardised extension to HTML to stave off the immediate threat of XAML. Web Forms 2.0 and the upcoming Web Apps 1.0 are meant to do just that.

XForms

[zemoo]

People keep saying that none of the browsers (especially IE support XForms so it will never take off.

What they fail to realize is that XForms is not necessarily a client-side technology and can be used *right now* in ALL major browsers.

Take a look at Chiba for a server-side implementation that works pretty well. No plugins to install!