February 17th, 2005
The escalating conflict over Web forms standards
News.com’s Paul Festa has a story about major conflict among the standards bodies over the specification for interactive forms for Web applications. This is a big deal: Forms are used everywhere on the Web, from Amazon to Yahoo to your friendly Web e-mail, and now enterprises want to broadly enable forms for communicating from back-end systems to Web front ends. Also in question is whether Microsoft would adopt an open standard for electronic forms for Internet Explorer and Web-based Windows applications.
"At the moment it’s mass confusion," said Dharmesh Mistry, chief technology officer of Newbury, U.K.-based EdgeIPK, which builds forms-based applications for clients in the financial services industry. "The W3C is saying the answer is XForms. Microsoft is saying it’s XAML. Macromedia is saying its Flash MX. And Mozilla is saying it’s XUL. If you look at it from the point of view of an organization, you’re not going to say, ‘We’re going to write our rich Internet applications in one language and the forms in XForms.’"
The battle illustrates chronic fissures in the politics of Web technology development, with substantial consequences for the continued relevance of open standards in electronic forms–a ubiquitous tool that’s used to gather information on the Web and in other digital applications.
As Groucho Marx said: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
