XForms Becomes Proposed Recommendation 247
leighklotz writes "The W3C has announced that XForms is now a Proposed Recommendation, after certification of one full implementation (open
source Java XSmiles from Finland) and two more implementations of each feature (the Internet
Explorer plug-in FormsPlayer
and the Java standalone Novell
xPlorer). XForms is the next generation of forms for the Web, and uses an
XML-based three-layer model: data model, data, and user interface.
XForms uses CSS for device independencence and is designed for
integration into XHTML 2,
SVG, and other XML-based markup
languages. A host of other implementations
are available or in progress, but my pick for most interesting is DENG, which is an
XForms to Flash compiler written in Flash. DENG supports
XForms, SVG, RSS, XHTML, and CSS. XForms is in consideration for other standards as diverse as Universal
Remote Controls and the UK
Government Interoperability Framework, and was developed with the
participation of IBM, Oracle, Xerox, Adobe, Novell, SAP, Cardiff,
PureEdge, and a host of other companies,
universities, and invididuals."
Not again... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can make "plain old CGIs written in Perl" jump up and do tricks without any fancy new whizbang technology telling me it's time to re-evaluate the whole way I make Web forms. Not to mention the fact that this is going to be a nightmare to integrate into all of the browsers.
When people started talking about Flash as if it were some sort of an IEEE-blessed, completely open standard, and as if it were available in all browsers, (I'm sorry, but "the most common browsers on the most common operating systems" doesn't count), I knew the Web was going downhill fast. Now we're mired in our own complexity, we have a billion plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc. etc. etc.)... and now they're telling us that plain old <FORM> isn't good enough. Dammit, I want back to 1995 and Slackware 3.0...
an open letter to w3c (Score:5, Insightful)
thank you for your recommendation of yet another over-complicated standard for the world wide web. while we do appreciate the time and effort it takes to keep coming up with esoteric standards that involve the letter 'x', we currently are not searching to implement any additional layers of abstraction into our website viewing experience. we currently have xml backends that are interpreted by xslt's to generate style sheets that are controlled by dhtml, and feel that adding another abstraction layer to what was originally a simple way to serve a formatted text page would take us into the realm of meta-meta-meta-meta-programming, and that's probably two meta's too many for us. we have decided that we would rather spend our time creating interesting content, than debugging at what level our standards-based fancy pants websites are breaking on each browser.
so, while you guys are doing good job there in lotus-eating land, we on the real web will be passing on this standard.
thanks,
the world wide web
Re:Not again... (Score:2, Insightful)
To consider your analogy, Perl, C and company are great for scripting and application building, but at the same time, sometimes you need to roll your own language to perform operations that just weren't needed 10 years ago. Progress is good; sometimes it's beneficial to throw everything out, and start from scratch. See what's broken and fix it permanently. At least, until the next new technology comes around ;3. But such is life in the tech world. Get used to it, or you'll be sweeping floors with all the old PL/I and Flowmatic programmers who didn't want to adapt either.
Re:an open letter to w3c (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen to that. I don't really see anything in the standard that cannot be done with the current technology (except the suspend/resume... but as another poster noted, WHY?!). While this argument is often a bad one in that it can cause one to be stuck in the past forever, in the case of web development, stability is better than progress. The web is finally starting to reach a point (after many, many years of frustration) where everyone is using the same standard and most users have capable web browsers. Yet, just when the job of the web developer is looking to become almost managable, they want to add an entirely new mess that will involve a whole new generation of browser incompatibility and proprietary "features". There just aren't enough compelling reasons to face the compatibility nightmare. Yet another worthless standard...
BTW, what is up with this whole "separate the logic from the interface" kick about. While it is an interesting programming model, I do not see why an entirely new standard is required to support it. This kind of thing is already possible given existing server-side technology. Just wondering.
Hrm... (Score:1, Insightful)
The thing is, a clearer specification and better flow for form-handling most definitely is needed. Any webdesigner who's ever spent time working on "webbased applications" has quite probably experienced going completely stir crazy with building up stupid forms element by element and javascript functions for interaction between these. Even something as trivial as giving focus to an element requires a quite lengthy string: document.formname.elementname.focus();
XForms has built-in events to deal with all those far too common tasks and make webbased applications for the first time ever actually work like applications. You'll be able actually pay attention to stuff like workflow.
Sure, the XForms syntax sucks, and I'd hate to have to hand-code applications using it almost as much as I hate trying to do the same with current forms. Unfortunately given the W3C's chosen route of XML, and the need to make XForms integrate with the next "HTML" standard (XHTML 2.0), this was inevitable.
However, at the same time there's the major benefit of it being XML and thus far more likely to be computer-generatable.
XForms is not perfect. But four or five years from now when IE has finally caught up and is handling XForms without the need for any plugins, developers creating webbased applications will be giving silent prayers for the people who created the standard.
Re:Not again... (Score:3, Insightful)
If, instead of continually reinventing the wheel, we would focus on refining EXISTING technologies, we would be so much further down the road now. Imagine a 4GHz Pentium 4 (or, as I'd prefer, a dual 2GHz Power Macintosh G5) running some beautifully written, hand-optimized C or assembly code, tuned and tweaked and whittled into glistening sleek perfection over the past 20 years. The OS would boot in under 1MB of RAM, including the TCP/IP stack, the Web browsing environment, the sound server, the firewall and the file browser. "System Requirements" sections on software boxes would be a thing of the past, since the software would work on virtually any computer released in the past 15 years. The whole system would include beautifully refined and trimmed APIs, perfected over a decade or more, for all programmers to write to.
But no, at some point along the line, the emphasis in the computing field went from efficiency and quality to "OOH! LOOK! SHINY!". That is where we started to go downhill.
Here is an exercise for you, Mr. New-School Thinker. Go buy a Commodore 64. (or use an emulator...) Install Contiki on it. There you have a complete GUI system that runs in 64 kilobytes of RAM. That's KILOBYTES, not megabytes! The sort of devil-may-care, newer-is-better school of thought you advocate is what has prevented this sort of thing from being a marketable reality. An ounce of restraint on the part of coders would have done so much 10 to 20 years ago, when code bloat started on its eternal downward cycle. I should have seen something bad coming down the pike the instant when I bought Windows 3.0 (this was "back in the day" when it was new) and it brought my '286 to a crawl. Meanwhile, Appleworks, arguably a more complex software system than the entirity of Windows 3.0, ran beautifully on piddly little Apple IIs with 32KB or so of RAM.
And people like you keep advocating newer, bloatier, more "complexified" (to borrow a word from Star Control 3) solutions to fundamentally simple problems.
Some day, I hope to get off my rear end, and prove all of you wrong, by making an OS the right way-- that is, optimize, optimize, optimize, and optimize some more, and DAMN the shiny new tech!
This yanks the rug out from under Office 2003! (Score:3, Insightful)
You might not appreciate this, but decoupling data, logic and presentation is a good thing for us all. If I can have a form control that pulls the applicable bits out of an OpenOffice (also XML) file and displays it appropriately for the web or the PDA, or sends it to a database that needs is ... I'm one happy dataslinger.
The ability to do this sort of thing is what Microsoft has been touting as the next best thing coming soon to an expensive proprietary desktop near you as soon as they get a handle on that security stuff. But from what I have seen of the Microsoftian version of XML (totally bastardized by the Beast of Redmond), and what little I have done with Java IDEs ... this will be much easier and cleaner to implement.
Doesn't anyone care about efficiency? (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft InfoPath? (Score:5, Insightful)
I got to test InfoPath myself this week, and found it to be a tool which was intuitive, powerful, easy to use, and standards-compliant.
Yes. The M$ product complied to every widely accepted standard possible. It uses XML almost exclusively, seems to have an extensive API, and uses syntactically correct XHTML wherever it can.
Xforms isn't even a standard yet. Don't bash M$ for not complying to it. In fact, it's quite different than Xforms in that it's designed for MUCH MORE than the web (in fact, I find that it's not really geared twoard the web at all)
So, for now, Microsoft seems to have produced a working next-generation form solution before any of the open groups or competitors. (Note: Windows is by no means my primary OS. I use Linux extensively, as well as Mac OS X, and am typing this from my Mac)
So much noise, so little signal (Score:3, Insightful)
Having followed the development of XForms for the last couple of years, I have to say I'm pretty impressed. For instance, I've seen a stunning demo of an implementation by Oracle, where the same form has been filled in over a PC screen, a mobile phone screen, a regular phone by speaking and being spoken to, and even over an Instant Messenger buddy. The same form not different forms that do the same thing, or different forms generated from a central hybrid. People, you cannot do that with HTML forms. Until you understand the power of having a live XML instance in your form, you haven't understood the power of XForms.
Go and look at the Google search example on FormsPlayer.com and tell me that's not cool; or the live map search with XSmiles.
I know it's tough, just when you've got your head round HTML, Javascript, the DOM and all that stuff, to be told that there is something new coming that also has to be learnt, but please don't go judging it because of its name, TLA's, the fact that the spec is hard to read, or that it's new until you've actually seen it in action and tried it out.
I've been told that no other W3C spec has had so many implementations before it was even a recommendation. I think that that fact alone means we should take it seriously and try to evaluate it rationally.
Re:We don't need no backwards compatibility (Score:1, Insightful)
The fact that there are already commercial implementations doing what you want (delivering XForms to legacy devices) seems to imply that it is possible
Re:Thank god. (Score:4, Insightful)
If Xforms allows the browser to verify fields, doesn't that mean we base our security on trusting the client?
Re:Doesn't anyone care about efficiency? (Score:3, Insightful)
-Tupshin
Re:Not again... (Score:3, Insightful)
But that is not what they are doing today. They silently switched from standardization to specification, developing "standards" out of the blue - and they suck at it!
The worst example is probably W3C XML Schema - the classical example of design by committe, hard to use, theoretically unsound, with lots of stuff bolted on without real integration late in the process (like the gHorribleKludge date/time types). And now they force it in into every other spec. They are seriously alienating huge parts of the community - take XPath2/XSLT2 for example, there have been quite some implementors stating that they don't plan to support it, ever (for example the ones of 4XSLT (Python) and libxslt (C)) - their user base doesn't need it (and yes, the userbase itself said so), and it makes the implementation way more complex than it has to be for XSLT1.
I certainly don't want the browser wars back, but I miss the old, working W3C.
Re:Au Contraire... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft InfoPath? (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's always easier to make the compromises you want, for what you want, than it is to work with a group and come up with something everyone is happy with. So this isn't a supprise, or even unexpected.
You do not know sh..... (Score:2, Insightful)