Moreover, with the appendix C guidelines for XHTML combined with
making the important ease-of-authoring changes to XForms that
*are* what we need to harvest from WF2
If XForms is "harvesting" stuff from WF2, what's in it for WF2?
Come on now people, the W3C is _not_ a school playground! Play nicely
together. As one of the poor form authors stuck in the middle here I
don't care whether the W3C Forms markup language is called XForm,
YForms, Web Forms or Fly Trap Forms. I do however ask that people try
to work together in an atmosphere of helpful co-operation and mutual
respect, even when they happen to be in violent disagreement.
I welcome technical debate, but does it have to be couched in such
unfriendly language? You all want to achieve the same things for Web
authors and users; you all agree on many of the things that need to
be done to get there (at least so it seems). The WF2 people agree
that there is good stuff in XForms and the XForms WG has agreed that
there is good stuff in WF2.
So rather than "What's in it for WF2?", the questions I would like
you to ask are:
1. "Can XForms and WF2 be combined into a single spec to the benefit
of the Web?" I think that is the gist of IBM's statement. To which I
really hope the answer will be "Yes."
2. "If the answer to question 1 is 'yes', then is there any value in
XForms and WF2 continuing to exist independently of each other?" It
would be nice if everyone was happy to answer that one with a "No".
Of course you might end up thinking that bringing the two together is
a completely broken idea, in which case please just say so, nicely.
However, I hope that everyone is open-minded enough not to have that
as their opening position.
Please also bear in mind that if the W3C continues down the current
track and ends up promoting two approaches to authoring Web
applications it will receive no thanks from users. Perhaps a good
start would be to have just one working group co-ordinating work on
Web forms, rather than the two we have just now (someone made a silly
mistake there didn't they!).
All the best
Mark
