It's maybe to late in the night to start a rant, but I will do it. The problem I have with Woody at the moment is, that it becomes more and more a client side styling and JavaScript library while it should focus on the server side form processing.

Especially the JS stuff is ugly and horrible. If I see things like

result += "<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Calendar</TITLE>"+this.getStyles()+"</HEAD><BODY MARGINWIDTH=0 MARGINHEIGHT=0 TOPMARGIN=0 RIGHTMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0>\n";

I wonder why you are doing/choosing/accepting such an approach. How should this work in future? It might work for many cases at the moment, but not all browsers are supported, Safari does even crash on such stuff [1]. You will get more and more bug reports in the future about any JS not working in a browser or a styling not looking correct like [2]. Strict HTML 4 has little problems at the moment, XHTML does not work completely! And I do not wonder about this. Might all be little fixable bugs, but it's not worth the time IMO.

IMO Woody should re-focus on form processing. Yes, we should provide a default view, but a simple one. If there must be used any JS as I see it for the calendar or the help popups then it should definitely be done the standard way (i.e. W3C DOM) and never using document.write(). We can show nice gimmicks, but not "everything that's possible". Who wants to maintain the recent code? Is the calendar styleable to get it in Corporate Identity? In contradiction to "all browser support" ("works with Netscape 4.x, 6.x, IE 5.x ...") new stuff like <label/> and <fieldset/> is used, that only works in recent browsers, while for JS you want to support NetScape 4.x.

I also don't like "mattkruse-lib". I thought we have no code-ownership? Mentioning him like @author is absolutely ok, but not that conspicuous.

I don't know if I forget any detail I wanted also to point out. Maybe I can add it in the (hopefully raising) discussion.

Good night,

Joerg

[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=106941742522128&w=2
[2] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24900



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