Push Button Paradise

After writing a three part review of Web Forms 2.0, and a follow-up call for unification, I'm greatly encouraged by this discussion with Ian Hickson about the forms community. Quoting his message:

You wrote:

Section 2 starts off saying "At the heart of any form lies the form controls", which seems like a poor choice of words.

Agreed. Removed.

Another useful resource is description of common features that are widely implemented in IE and other browsers, but not formally documented as a standard anywhere. In this camp is the autocomplete attribute. There are likely others as well, but the arrangement of the document makes it difficult to see which features fall into this category.

True. I have made a note to add an appendix in future specs that detail which parts are known to have been widely implemented already.

Based on that experience, I've concluded that [the repetition] section doesn't live up to one of the primary requirements of WF2: that it should provide familiar ground for existing developers.

I agree. Unfortunately we haven't really seen a better proposal. Suggestions welcome! (The XForms model is unfortunately not really an option here for several reasons; in the first place it is not backwards compatible, not even to the small extent that the WF2 model is, and in the second place it is poorly defined in terms of the DOM, which makes it hard to integrate into the general HTML forms and CSS styling model.)

On the last point, I responded:

On the repeat stuff, why not work within the XForms group to make the repeating stuff better defined at the DOM/CSS/XBL "shadow tree"/etc. level?

So discussions begin, it seems. We'll get a chance to chat more at XTech, I'm sure. -m

posted at: 07:17 | under: 2005-05 | 0 comment(s)