So Slashdot finally woke up* and discovered the WHAT-WG spec. After reading through the comments, it is very clear that the people criticizing the proposals have not the slightest idea of what WHAT-WG is even about. Very few people will actually take the time to read the spec (ok, I admit it. I had a five hour flight ahead of me so I downloaded the Web Forms document in advance...), so the working group simply needs to do a better job of explaining what WHAT is all about.
In short, what whatwg.org needs is a set of bullet points: what can you do with Web Forms that would otherwise be impossible? How does Web Forms make the web better? Writing this of course takes time away from doing Real Work, but it's important too; people cannot support your work if you do not make it easy for them to know what it's all about.
Secondly, the demos on the whatwg site could use some improvement. To start, someone (no don't look at me, I have too much to do already ;) could write a perl module that subclasses CGI.pm and adds the new Web Forms tags. Ideally, the module could use the required dark magic to support the needed features from the server side for legacy clients because, let's face it, just about everything is a legacy client right now. This project would let developers see the advantages of Web Forms 2.0 and start using its features right now in real-world applications.
Now I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been really involved in the Working Group at all. As such, this post can certainly be seen as criticism when I ought to pick up a shovel and start moving the muck around too. I hope to get more involved in the process and maybe execute some of these ideas in the future.
*Does anyone actually even read Slashdot anymore? It's absolute rubbish. Now I used to think it was the greatest thing on the web, so either the site has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, or (more likely), I grew up.
Posted by zach at February 20, 2005 5:59 PMAfter subscribing ro the slashdot rss feed for quite some time, i realized that i never even read the headlines. The 100+ items per day is way too much. After i realized that, i switched to alterslash (http://alterslash.org/) which narrows it down to 10-20 items per day with relevant comments.
Posted by: Sami Haahtinen on February 20, 2005 10:01 PMI read it, mostly only the headlines, and I comment on anything related to Mozilla/WHATWG/anything else I know about to help stop any FUD by the people who don't know what they're talking about.
Posted by: dolphinling on February 21, 2005 7:03 AM