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W3C Team Comment on Web Forms 2.0 Submission

The W3C acknowledges the Web Forms 2.0 Submission from Opera Software ASA and The Mozilla Foundation.

The Web Forms 2.0 Submission specifies extensions to the HTML 4.01 Forms chapter. As the content of this Submission is covered by existing W3C Working Groups the acknowledgement of the Submission was not straightforward. The W3C Team strongly recommend that future work should be in collaboration with the W3C HTML and XForms Working Groups in order to promote the development of a single community for improving forms on the Web. The W3C Team looks forward to working with Opera Software and The Mozilla Foundation to build consensus on unified approaches to forms and related Web technologies.

Overview of the Web Forms 2.0 Submission

The Web Forms 2.0 Submission from Opera Software and The Mozilla Foundation extends the features found in the HTML 4.01 Forms chapter. HTML forms are an extremely popular and well-understood technology but have some limitations. These limitations include a lack of comprehensive data typing and client-side validation of form fields, the reliance on scripting for moderately complex tasks and the inability to specify the encoding of a form submission.

Web Forms 2.0 modifies existing HTML 4.01 features and also adds new features. An incomplete list of the modifications made to HTML 4.01 are summarized below:

• New data types for form controls (eg. a field can be marked as accepting "email" or "date" typed content).
• The ability to mark a form field as required (ie. the user must complete the field before the form is submitted).
• Some client-side validity checking, including markup to specify what values are allowed and DOM interfaces to check validity.
• The ability to use form controls outside a form definition.
• A feature to mark a form in a manner that either suggests the user agent should automatically insert historical data into the form or that it should never remember the values entered into submitted form fields.
• The ability to provide a set of suggested values for a form field.

Some of the features added by Web Forms 2.0, beyond HTML 4.01 form functionality, are summarized below:

• An element that displays the result of defined client-side processing of form values. This is similar to the XForms 'output' element.
• The ability to create a repeating form element (eg. a list of orders). This is similar to the XForms Repeat Module.
• A feature to initialize a form with data from an external source. This is somewhat similar to the way XForms separates its form instance from the controls (the XForms instance can be external).

The design goals for Web Forms 2.0 were that it should be backwards compatible with existing HTML user agents, if possible, and be implementable on devices with resource constraints.

Relationship to W3C work

The following W3C Activities operate in areas related to the Web Forms 2.0 Submission:

• The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Activity produces the XHTML specifications and maintains the HTML 4.01 specification.

  As an extension to HTML, Web Forms 2.0 has a clear relationship to the HTML Activity.

• The XForms Activity has developed a complete revision of HTML forms: the XForms 1.0 Recommendation. Interestingly, the XForms Working Group started in March 1999 with a similar set of requirements and a similar approach to Web Forms 2.0. The Working Group concluded that this approach did not provide adequate improvement over existing HTML 4.01 forms technology and that a new design was needed (resulting in XForms).

  Given that both XForms and Web Forms 2.0 are replacements for HTML forms, it is possible to consider them as competing technologies.

• Other areas of W3C that may have a relationship to Web Forms 2.0 include the Device Independence Activity, the Compound Document Formats Activity and the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Comments

This response only lists non-technical comments on the Web Forms 2.0 Submission.

The acknowledgement of this Submission was not a straightforward decision for a number of reasons.

The W3C chartered the Forms Working Group in 1998 with the goal of improving HTML forms. This group started with a very similar approach as the Web Forms 2.0 Submission but concluded that it did not adequately address the requirements of the Web community (more background.) Furthermore, the consensus opinion of the members within the W3C HTML and Forms Working Groups is that the HTML 4.01 specification should not be extended in the way Web Forms 2.0 suggests. Rather, the Working Groups feel that the enhancements to HTML should be made in XHTML 2.0 and enhancements to HTML Forms have been provided by XForms (Requirements, Specification). Also, the authors of the Submission have at times promoted Web Forms 2.0 as competitor to the W3C XForms Recommendation.

The W3C Process suggests that Submissions that fall under the domain of an existing Working Group should not be acknowledged. Instead the work should be presented directly to the appropriate Working Group, in this case both the HTML and Forms Working Groups. However, given the amount of discussion regarding Web Forms 2.0 we felt it was best to acknowledge the Submission in order to promote the development of a single community for improving forms on the Web.

The W3C Team strongly recommend that future work in this area should be in collaboration with the HTML and XForms Working Groups.

Web Forms 2.0 makes some incremental improvements to existing HTML features and adds some substantial new features and behaviour. We recommend that Web Forms 2.0 be evolutionary in nature, as was originally planned, and move the more advanced features into a separate specification. For example:

1. A Web Forms 2.0 specification containing the incremental enhancements including the features that are completely backwards compatible in legacy user agents.
2. A Web Forms 3.0 specification containing the new features that are not usable in legacy user agents without scripting or plugins. As noted above, many of these new features in Web Forms 2.0 are similar in scope, design and approach to features already present in XForms.

We feel that the evolutionary approach we suggest will help adoption by users and provide a path for implementers to incrementally deliver the new features in user agents.

We recommend that the Web Forms 2.0 specification give detailed use cases and requirements for each new feature or incremental enhancement. If possible, it should describe existing options, the level of demand for each feature and the impact of not meeting the requirements (if the feature was not provided and a user was therefore required to use the existing HTML facility, possibly with scripting).

Next steps

The W3C Team looks forward to working with the submitters to build consensus for unified approaches to forms and related Web technologies. The W3C Team and the submitters are currently investigating methods for collaboration. From this review of Web Forms 2.0, we recommend that Opera Software and The Mozilla Foundation:

• Consider separating the backwards-compatible features from the features that require users to update their user agents or rely on scripting (as described above).
• Provide comprehensive use cases and requirements for each enhancement (as described above).
• Demonstrate how Web Forms 2.0 maps to XForms (and the reverse), giving more attention to the features in Web Forms 2.0 that are similar to XForms.
• Participate in the development of XHTML and XForms specifications (note that Opera have been a member of the HTML Working Group for 4 years.)
• Build a community, with cooperation from the W3C, to discuss, develop and promote adoption of improved forms on the Web.