WWW2007: Dave Raggett on “Next steps for HTML Forms”

Note: These are rough notes from the WWW2007 conference.

Now is a good chance to fix mistakes of the Web.

What do people use forms for?  What are the new things?  We need to enable people.

Now to author a web page, you have to be an expert in a lot of things.  What about authoring for normal people?

Today we don’t have an easy way to do required fields, validity tests, simple sums, or dynamic html.   Regular expressions scripting is too difficult.

In 1998, there was the idea of moving towards XML for forms.  This led to XForms.  It used to the MVC, data was XML, and used declarative form logic.   It has been too radical for browser vendors.

There is a new proposal for Web Forms 2.0  Its based around graceful degradation. There is rich controls and many data types.

Most people aren’t Web programmers.  There is the need for high level authoring tools.

HTML is a huge success.  Scripting is powerfull but too difficult.  We need incremental improvements.

Join the HTML WG.