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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Browser innovation efforts -- where's W3C in this picture?
 * Michael Champion wrote: >I've noticed a couple of things that seem a bit odd, and would like to >get a better idea of the context. First, there was the Mozilla/Opera >collaboration on Web Forms 2.0 [...] Uhh, why this rather than just >supporting XForms? Extending HTML's form features has lower implementation cost, a lower learning curve for content providers, and can be - to some extend - designed to degrade gracefully in clients that do not support those new features, so such new functionality would be relevant for content providers today rather than in several years when support is stable and available to the relevant audience. So the question rather seems to be why should they support XForms? A good reason would be that users demand support because they want to use XForms content. It does not seem that there is a significant class of users who demand that, probably because they are not aware of XForms content they want to use but cannot and/or they are not aware why they would prefer XForms content over HTML forms content. Another good reason would be that content providers demand support because they want to provide XForms content. Such content providers are rare, too, probably because they are not aware of XForms at all, or they are not convinced of the benefits XForms offers over HTML forms, or they are convinced but do not speak up loud enough or not at all. W3C's only answer to "better" forms on web sites so far is XHTML 2.0 for which the latest Working Draft is fourteen months old (and the first planned date for Last Call that I know of was 7 Dec 2001...), so, as XHTML 2.0 is going to be incompatible with all previous HTML/XHTML versions, what would be the migration path for content providers? There is none, the best we can currently expect is that XHTML 2.0 will use a different MIME type than XHTML 1.0 which was at least controversial last time it was mentioned on www-html. Even if there will be a new MIME type, it would mean that content providers will have to provide at least two versions of their content until user agents that support XHTML 2.0 will be sufficiently deployed. Unless there is a sufficiently cheap tool that auto-generates HTML content from XHTML 2.0 content of similar quality, this will probably be seen as too expensive. So they would wait until it is sufficiently deployed. Considering that there are still content providers who care about supporting Netscape Navigator 4.x it seems unlikely that this will happen before 2008. That's a bit long for content providers to wait, isn't it? After all, the need for better forms was present even during the development of HTML 3.0 about ten years ago, which proposed e.g. a range control and scribble pads... If there is no explicit demand, it might also be a good reason for a browser vendor to implment a specific technology if they are convinced there is such demand but it just isn't expressed for some reason, so that they can reasonably assume that the investment in an implementation will pay off. For this they would need to be able to reasonably assume that content providers will adopt the technology. For XForms it is however argued that they would not as it is very different from what they already know and that it is far more complicated. Maybe that is a false perception so that this is basically a marketing issue, maybe it is true and thus a technical problem. And even if the browser vendor is convinced that it should implement XForms, they apparently struggle into implementation issues. My understanding is that for example Opera wants to ship its browser with equal features for desktops and small devices of which the latter have constraints in terms of storage/memory capacities and that according to them an XForms Basic implementation does not fit into these constrained facilities, not to mention the entire XForms specification. I have however good faith that they would sort this out. To me it seems that they do not think that XForms is clearly a superior solution for forms on web sites. Is it? And if it is, can we tell content providers anything else than to wait three to six years to use XForms on their web site? And if not, what is exactly wrong with creating something that can be used in the meantime? 
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