Dorward

Web Standards

18 February 2005

ZDNet have produced a few pages on the future of forms.

As far as I can gather, the W3C thinks people should use XForms on the client side. Meanwhile WHATWG thinks people should use Web Forms instead.

According to ZDNet, The Mozilla team are backing Web Forms, but that doesn't stop there being an official Mozilla XForms project going on too. ZDNet might be wrong though, there is little mention of WHATWG on Mozilla.org. They quote Brendan Eich as saying "XForms is not a Web standard" - but what is a Web Standard anyway?

I can't see myself moving away from HTML 4.01 / XHTML 1.0 forms for the near to medium future. There might be some useful JavaScript coming out of WHATWG, but I doubt I use much without altering it to remove the need to use non-standard attributes.