Matthew Raymond:
Klotz, Leigh wrote:
Explain to me why Web Forms 2.0 shouldn't be "incorporating more of
the great ideas" in XForms-Tiny rather than the other way around. Why is
your approach to cannibalize an existing W3C working draft to enrich a
draft you haven't even finished yet? What, in your opinion, makes WF2
unsalvageable?
Or what makes you want to cannibalize an existing W3C Recommendation
which predates the formation of WHAT-WG?
Are you trying to justify hypercannibalization?!? Or are you just
trying to cover up the fact that XForms and WF2 don't occupy the same
niche, but XForms-Tiny and WF2 do?
I will not get into this "who occupies which
niche" thing from the perspective of the
respective groups who created the specifications,
but rather - and much more important - from the
perspective of the market. Regardless of whether
or not the respective groups claim that their
intention was not to cross each others border, the
market doesn't care at all and is confused.
To illustrate this, let me point you to this
article by Anne v. Kersteren: "Improve your forms
using HTML5!" [1]. It has been recently DIGGed [2]
and here are some comments:
---
"What the hell? No XHTML? Attributes with no
values and values without quotes is so 1996."
"There can't be xHTML5 without xHTML 2.0 being
released. This group is undermining the W3C, and
aren't really introducing anything new (that we
can't do with CSS). Face it HTML is dead, xHTML is
the future."
"This isn't very exciting seeing how standard
forms will be replaced with XForms..."
"It seems to me that XForms is a much nicer
implementation of this... :)"
"Um yeah, that's what I was thinking. I'd rather
use XHTML and CSS, with XForms if necessary."
"Oh great more divergence"
"This page starts out by implying that XHTML and
XHTML2 don't exist. Then it goes on to show
examples of 'web forms 2' using shortcut filled,
unbalanced HTML4 style markup.
Tag soup is evil. Sure they say there's a version
of HTML5 that resembles valid XML (XHTML5), but it
sure seems like they don't want anyone to use it.
XForms, 'nuff said: http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/";
"i thought HTML 5 was supposed to be XHTML 1.0?"
"This article is a joke.
Buried."
"HTML 5? Please tell me this is a joke..."
"This is horrible. It's a mess and I personally
can't believe that it's on Opera's dev site."
"I prefere XForms (MVC Pattern).
HTML > 4 IMHO have no sense since there are XHTML."
---
Harmonizing the concepts of WF2 and XForms Full
into something like XForms Tiny to get a more
consistent story out there would seem to be a good
thing.
Not doing so leaves a bigger mess. Developing
XForms Tiny together is a limited time offer from
the W3C Forms WG to reduce confusion. Separatism
will make this option go away - a behaviour which
cannot be the intent of a W3C Working Group trying
to reduce confusion and create a standard, in the
interest of the Web and perhaps not in the
interest of certain individuals and/or companies.
- Sebastian
[1]
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/improve-your-forms-using-html5/
[2]
http://digg.com/design/Improve_your_forms_using_HTML5_2
