The The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents took place earlier this week. My understanding of the purpose was to provide movers and shakers (as well as incumbents) an opportunity to direct W3 efforts. If you’ve got time, it’s worth looking over the agenda, where presentation slides have been published, to get a feel for what took place.
Some “key notes” seem to be;
- the W3 should focus of unifying and leveraging existing standards - make the whole greater than the sum of the parts
- beyond the browser: the web should “work” for wireless / handheld devices
- declarative XML user interface languages (e.g. XUL or XAML) are desirable
Dave Raggett’s New Directions for Web Applications (PDF) is particularly worth a glance. Dave wins the “keeping it real” award IMO, which is to be expected from the “inventor” of the HTML form tag. Also noteworthy is the Opera / Mozilla joint position paper - more on that @ Mozillazine.
Meanwhile Neil Deakin of XULPlanet delivers a reality check.
June 7th, 2004 at 2:07 pm
I’d be interested in you thoughts on some of the new W3C specs like Web Forms 2.0, Web Apps 1.0 and Web Controls 1.0. As there is more power (and therefore possibly larger % of your program) into the client how does this effect how web applications are built?
Making things easy to do often promotes a style of programming. I was just thinking that if these specifications were designed properly, they might promote cleaner separation of the View and Controller simply because it is easier for people to code it that way.