Web Forms 2.0, by contrast, will be compatible with current browsers. But critics of the proposal fault its reliance on scripting, a programming method they claim isn't suitable for industrial-strength applications.
With Web Forms 2.0 poised to break out of its working group, the W3C will have to disappoint one or more of its forms factions.
WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms.
"It's going to be a bit of a struggle for the W3C to determine what they want this to ultimately do," said John Boyer, senior product architect and research scientist at PureEdge Solutions, in Victoria, British Columbia, whose company uses XForms. "I'm sure they don't want to lose control over defining the vocabulary of the Web, and at the same time, they don't want to be seen as sending a mixed message in doing two alternate dialects. This has by no means been decided yet."
Though the success of one method or another might not seem to make much difference to the person filling out an order form, the fate of open standards in the process could determine whether that form can relay the data it collects to any standards-compliant database or banking system, or whether it can only operate within certain proprietary systems.
The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system -- an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft.
WHAT-WG has taken some liberties with naming its specification -- there is no "Web Forms 1.0" as such. The HTML 4 specification does specify how to construct forms on the Web, but that spec, last updated in 1999, is a relic in Internet time.
In an attempt to modernise Web forms, the W3C in 2000 launched the XForms initiative, an ambitious attempt to build forms out of XML, or Extensible Markup Language, a W3C recommendation for writing documents in a highly structured way so that computers, as well as people, can make sense of them.
In the world of forms, machine-readable documents are a big plus. They let back-end databases communicate with front-end Web sites, and they can let computers keep track of what fields collect what types of information.
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We currently have a lot of government and financial institutions that do not check for new browsers, relying on code written in 2000 or earlier to determine if a browser is compatable. This discriminate against people who have new, current, and superior browsers. It can also be interpreted legally as conspiring with specific browser suppliers to create an illegal monopoly.
We need the courts to decide if that is acceptable (NO!) or if they will also conspire with illegal monopoly browser manufacturers.