As Net heavyweights vie to define the next generation of Web applications, the Web's main standards body is facing a revolt within its own ranks over electronic forms.
This week, a breakaway faction of the W3C said its work on the Web Forms 2.0 specification is nearly done and put out a call for final comments. The splinter group, which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, calls itself WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.
The move brings a new entry into the race to take forms software to the next level, complicating efforts to create an open standards foundation for emerging Internet applications that could shape the competitive landscape in software development for years to come. It also marks a major new headache for the W3C, whose XForms recommendation, unveiled in 2003, has long been stymied amid resistance from proprietary software makers, especially Microsoft.
"At the moment it's mass confusion," said Dharmesh Mistry, chief technology officer of Newbury-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 organisation, 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.
Forms based on current Web standards are used in every Google search, every Amazon.com sale, every automated blog entry, every online tax payment, and every Web email log-in.
Now the industry wants more sophisticated forms that can underlie new Internet application platforms, communicating more fluently with back-end databases and customer relationship management systems.
XForms versus Web Forms
Although XForms offers advances over current standards-based HTML forms, some W3C members worry that it faces an uphill battle because it isn't supported by the current generation of Web browsers. That means Web surfers using today's browsers will have to download and install a plug-in to make it work, slowing adoption.
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, 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.
The W3C started releasing XForms drafts in 2000 and didn't put out a final recommendation until three years later. Analysts at the time blamed that delay on market apathy.
Today apathy is no longer the problem, as developers and vendors survey a sweeping array of technology platforms competing to build the next generation of Web-based applications. The W3C now finds XForms competing with those wide-ranging technologies.
In October, the W3C launched a working group to address Web applications with what it calls compound document formats, which include XForms. The WHAT-WG is also hammering out a draft specification dedicated to extending HTML for use with Web applications.
