Trouble forming at the W3C
Published: 18 Feb 2005 14:40 GMT
Worried about Microsoft
Though EdgeIPK and other developers look askance at XForms for its uncertain fit into the Internet application puzzle, browser makers still want a standards-based forms technology to help the Web steer clear of proprietary application platforms. They're particularly concerned about Microsoft's sprawling vision for Windows Longhorn applications built in the XML-based XAML markup language using Longhorn's Avalon graphics system. Browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, Opera and Safari will be useless to access these Internet-based Windows applications.
Pinning their hopes on Web Forms 2.0, these browser makers and standards advocates worry that full implementations of XForms will require a whole new generation of browsers.
"The XForms group tried to do the right thing, but as a result they dropped backwards compatibility," said Hakon Lie, Opera's chief technology officer, that company's representative on W3C's advisory committee, and a WHAT-WG founder. "And I think that's very unfortunate, because trying to replace a few hundred million browsers is a rather hard thing to do, and I don't think XForms is 10 times better."
The idea of native support for XForms in the Web's most common browser -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which accounts for about 90 percent of the market -- is a long shot at best. Microsoft's grander Longhorn ambitions aside, the company supplies the proprietary InfoPath technology for forms in its Office suite, it has not supported the W3C's XForms work, and it hasn't added significant new standards support to its IE in years.
That said, some third-party extensions do render XForms in IE.
Mozilla, seen as a rising browser force since the success of its Firefox releases, is backing Web Forms 2.0, though Mozilla contributors from Novell and IBM are hammering out a Mozilla extension that would provide XForms support.
Native support for XForms in Mozilla and its Gecko rendering engine is not on the foundation's near-term agenda as it takes a wait-and-see approach to the W3C recommendation.
"XForms is not a Web standard," said Brendan Eich, a founding member of Mozilla in charge of technical direction, the creator of JavaScript and a member of WHAT-WG. "It's a relatively new spec seeing early-adopter use in intranets."
Killing sheep to make goats
WHAT-WG members say the forms dispute illustrates a larger conflict over whether the W3C should proceed in a "revolutionary" mode, tackling problems from square one and coming up with technically elegant solutions -- even if that results in the loss of backward-compatibility with older browsers -- or an "evolutionary" mode, maintaining older technologies like HTML 4 and extending the usefulness of current browsing software.
"This gets to the question of what the W3C is all about," Lie said. "Is it about making revolutions all the time? Do we kill all the sheep and start with goats? Or should the W3C maintain older specs like CSS and HTML?"
The evolution versus revolution debate over forms centres on the use of scripting -- specifically JavaScript -- to perform important tasks in forms-based applications.
With current HTML Web forms, a Web author needs scripts to do things like validate the form or add up columns as fields are filled. For example, using HTML forms, Web authors typically use a scripting language to check that every phone number entered has an area code, or to automatically total columns in a spreadsheet.
XForms uses a declarative approach for validation and other crucial form functionality: The Web author or application designer declares that the application should validate the form or total the columns, and it does, but not using today's generation of browsers.
XForms defenders downplay the revolution versus evolution debate.
"The Web has always had the approach of a bit of evolution here, a bit of revolution there," said Steven Pemberton, chair of the W3C's HTML and forms working groups and a researcher at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. "HTML 4 was largely evolutionary -- it still ran in old software. But at a given moment, to make any progress, you have to add new functionality, which means that people have to get new software."
Pemberton blasted the scripting approach taken in Web Forms 2.0, saying it doesn't scale well, is harder to maintain, doesn't address industry requirements and use cases, and doesn't provide the ability to take snapshots of each step in a forms-based process for sensitive industrial or governmental applications.
"The WHAT approach works OK for small examples," Pemberton said. "But actors like the Department of Defense say 'no scripting'."
Pemberton said the W3C membership hadn't shown much enthusiasm for WHAT-WG's work in the past, instead preferring XML-based standards.
By contrast, he pointed to XForms implementations by W3C members Oracle and Sun -- in addition to those by Novell and IBM -- and promised more announcements of support in coming months from big companies he declined to name.
"I understand where WHAT is coming from, but they are browser makers, not forms experts," Pemberton said. "It is important to build something that is future-proof and not a Band-Aid solution. Forms [technology]is the basis of the e-commerce revolution and so it is important to do it right."
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