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

[Ender Ryan]

Are you daft, man? Microsoft "standards" may not be implementable by others, due to patents, Windows hooks in the "standard," and etc. Ever heard of ActiveX?

Microsoft's goal is to lock everyone else out, and if there's anything they're good it, it's that.

Anyway, Moz and Opera working together can only be good. It would be even better if they could work with Apple and the kHTML guys too.

Re:may the force be with them

[rice_web]

I seem to remember a few antitrust lawsuits a few years ago, which never went very well for Microsoft. If Microsoft overextends itself again, I believe that judges around the nation will be more inclined to levy the same charges. Further, judges are growing, if slowly, more computer literate, and they therefore have a greater understanding of technologies and the implications of monopolies in the marketplace (or so we should hope, after years in the courtroom).

if Microsoft's legal machine is able to fend off liberal judges, then we have a real problem. However, Microsoft is being torn to pieces by the courts, picked off bit by bit. Like a hydra, it just won't die unless it loses all its heads, but I believe it's injured to a degree that it can't venture into new technologies, dominate them, and evade the law.

Re:Well... no

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you daft, man? Microsoft "standards" may not be implementable by others, due to patents, Windows hooks in the "standard," and etc. Ever heard of ActiveX?

What is patented about ActiveX? Or are you referring to Eolas' patent?

Yeah, right

[Fished]

At this point, all Microsoft has to do to keep things proprietary is not implement the new standard. Why should they want to implement it when they can do some crazy com/.net solution that nobody can use except on a Windows PC?

Re:Yeah, right

[elbobo]

If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple get in on the act, that will be enough.

This new standard isn't the same as the rest of the web. In most cases it will be targeted and used largely for web applications, not web sites.

If you build a web site you have commercial pressure to ensure that it will be viewable in as many browsers and on as many platforms as possible. You can't have system requirements on a brochure.

If you build an application, people don't by default expect it to function on all platforms and browsers. People develop applications largely for single platforms, so that sort of focus can carry over reasonably smoothly to web applications.

Having said that, if it's implemented by all the above mentioned companies/browsers, then your application will gain immediate cross platform support, with users even having a choice of browser platform within their chosen OS platform.

I'm not talking about the current generation of web applications here, the likes of web mail (Hotmail, GMail, etc). I'm talking about the next generation, where the application looks and feels much closer to what we traditionally consider to be an application. That's where these standards are going. They won't feel like the web we know now, and won't be treated in the same manner.

So Microsoft can go off and do their own thing, and that's fine. As long as the other platforms have their equivalent technology, web application developers won't be left out in the cold if they want to build cross platform applications.

Anyone know technical details?

[Garg]

How would this Web Forms be different from the already-standardized, but not implemented by Mozilla or Opera, XForms [w3.org]? (Note: not the GUI toolkit for X [std.com] by the same name.) After all, the W3C page says XForms is "the next generation of Web Forms"...

The "Web Forms" name is so generic that Googling it is basically useless.

Garg

Avalon and .NET vs. Macromedia Flash Remoting

[bernywork]

In all honesty, this all just sounds like Microsoft's implementation of Flash Remoting. If you don't want to work in Avalon / .Net; what we need to do is to get a hook into Flash and start working with that for forms etc.

Either way, this seems to me like it's going to be "Browser wars, round 2, FIGHT!"