Mozilla And Opera Team Up For Web Forms Standard

darthcamaro writes "According to an article running on Internetnews.com today, Mozilla and Opera have teamed up on a web standards proposal for Web Forms 2.0 to be presented at a W3C working group this week. One of the proposal's authors is quoted in the article as saying '... that if a backwards-compatible open-standards alternative isn't created first, then 10 years from now the de facto Web application standard will be Microsoft's Avalon and the .NET framework.'
Are Opera and Mozilla the new 'rebel alliance' in the fight against the Microsoft Empire? Should we call this chapter 'A New Hope'?"

Re:Well... no

[will_die]

Microsoft product is called infopath [microsoft.com] In the market for web based forms thier are a bunch of products however the big 3, in name, would be microsoft's infopath, Macromedia's Flex [macromedia.com], and adobe report products. With the most wide spread being abode, mainly because they purchased formflow which has wide use.

Re:Anyone know technical details?

[t482]

The specification [hixie.ch]

1.3. Relationship to XForms [hixie.ch]

This specification is in no way aimed at replacing XForms 1.0 [XForms], nor is it a subset of XForms 1.0.

XForms 1.0 is well suited for describing business logic and data constraints. Unfortunately, due to its requirements on technologies not widely supported by Web browsers, it has not been widely implemented by those browsers itself. This specification aims to simplify the task of transforming XForms 1.0 systems into documents that can be rendered on every day Web browsers.

Re:Yeah, right

[Bas_Wijnen]

He hasn't been modded up, he has excellent karma which gives him a +1 bonus. I get the bonus, too, but I switched it off for this message, because this isn't anywhere near insightful ;-)

Re:Anyone know technical details?

[Brendan Eich]

Hi bwt, a couple of observations:

Technical details:

XPath is in Mozilla, has been for years. The XPath extensions needed by XForms look easy enough, although no one has signed up to do them yet.

Schema-based node validation is not in Mozilla. No one has come up with a plan yet to integrate an existing validator. T. V. Raman has suggested using Xerces wholesale, but the footprint hit seems big (1MB was a guesstimate). This is the big ticket item in the work to be done. Volunteers who know their way around Mozilla and Xerces would be ideal.

XML Events support is being implemented now, and should be done soon, provided the incomplete spec issues can be settled with the w3c, or by reasonable inference based on DOM precedent (never a safe thing with under-tested, _de jure_ standards).

Apart from these pieces, XForms needs only some generalization of Mozilla's form submission code, and the XForms processor itself. No one has signed up for these tasks yet.

Strategic analysis:

To understand how the Mozilla/Opera effort results in simplification, you should recall your own words in Mozilla's layout newsgroup [mozilla.org], where you argued that XForms is a compelling feature in enterprise settings, not on the Web. The Mozilla/Opera effort is about the Web. Content authors for web pages do not generally need to know all the XML standards required by XForms, let alone know XForms. This is unlikely to change, given IE's dominance and the lack of free/small XForms plugins for it.

Developers who use XForms must be working for businesses and other organizations who have intranet or vertical markets in which the right plugin or extended client (Mozilla, maybe) has been deployed. Web developers who use Web Forms 2.0 and other specs resulting from the whatwg.org effort need only use next year's Opera, Mozilla, Safari, or HTC-extended IE.

Two different developer markets, two different approaches to forms. Or at least two -- Adobe and Microsoft are doing their own, non-XForms, non-HTML or -evolved-HTML forms. The proprietary approaches are more likely leak onto the web in a few years if the whatwg.org effort fails.

/be