Moving From Online Documents To Light-Weight Web Applications

Speaker: T.V. Raman

Date: Thursday, October 13, 2005
Time: 3:30 - 5:00 PM
Location: Orange Conference Room, Bldg 40
Goodies: Tea and cookies provided

Speaker's Summary:

Since its inception, HTML has formed the basis of interactivity on the Web. HTML Forms in conjunction with scripting have been used over the last 10 years to discover the next set of useful primitives needed to create truly interactive Web applications. XHTML2 and XForms embody the lessons learned over this period by creating easy to use declarative constructs that enable a vast majority of use cases that have been discovered by means of programming the legacy HTML4 Web.

At the advent of the Web, HTML proved a great equalizer by enabling non-programmers to create interactive hypertext content. The discovery of light-weight Web applications in the form of interactive HTML forms backed by Javascript has turned the Web into an application deployment platform; however, this evolution has also limited much of this power to professional programmers. As a case in point, highly interactive Web applications like Google Maps and GMail demonstrate the power today's Web platform. But authoring such applications on the legacy Web is restricted to the elite few. XHTML2 and XForms are about re-democratizing the Web by bringing the power of interactive Web applications to the markup author.

My own work on XForms was motivated by the desire to design rich user interaction that degrades gracefully given differing sets of capabilities both in users and end-user devices. This talk will give an overview of the XForms design, how we got there, and with 20/20 hind-sight, summarize what we could have done better.