Alessandro Vernet (a huge fan of XForms) posted the above question on my recent AJAX post.

First of all I want to say: I actually don't care which technology is better to make enhanced forms handling in browsers possible - but please - make it available now and for all widely used browsers! We are stuck with plain old Web Forms for years now... when can we start creating semantic web applications and get over the mark-up language hacks we do today?

The reason why I believe Web Forms 2.0 has better changes to get larger adoption vs. the feature-richer and industry-approved XForms is that:

1. it extends well known concepts (HTML Forms, DOM)
2. it's simple
3. it's easy to integrate into an existing web sites

Although the XForms spec is older than Web Forms 2.0 no mayor browser has yet default support built-in (you can download extensions for IE and Firefox). Opera made a nice step to include default support for Web Forms 2.0 in their latest Opera 9 release. Some are working on an extension for IE to get Web Forms 2.0 partially working (using DHTML Behaviors). Bad news is that the upcoming IE7 nor Firefox 2.0 has plans to add any of the mentioned forms technology.

We will see how that forms story will evolve and thx to all that help making these standards widely adopted.

Technorati Tags: xforms webforms2 browser

Posted by Cedric at 6/25/2006 12:45:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

After making a detour with the Sony Ericsson S700i (with fantastic camera but Mobile 1.0 SMS storage limitation) I'm back in Nokia land. Here some random thoughts and findings from the first days of using the Nokia E70:

If you seriously think about using mobile application like blogging, local search, collaboration (mail, IM) - you need a solid human interface to your mobile phone: the built-in thumb keyboard (with background light a la Apple MacBook Pro) has proven to be easy to use.

Compared to the Nokia 6600 (the first Series 60 phone I had) Nokia has done a nice job making the UI nicer. I guess the screen has higher DPI and fonts and UI elements use smooth rendering. That makes especially small fonts good readable. You basically don't see pixels anymore - marvelous.

The built-in browser uses WebCore (from Apple Safari) to render pages. It has some surprising features - I like the back function that shows me the last pages as thumbnails and of course the blazing fast rendering (incl. JavaScript and AJAX stuff)

Sync with Mac OS X done via the iSync Extension from Nova Media - works like a charm. Thx guys.

And yes.. I have the alarm function back that tells me how many hours I have to sleep until wake-up time - the little things that matters ;-)

App compatibility is still bad: Series 60 3rd Edition is brand new and is not backward compatible with older releases. Therefore developers have to recompile and make sure they handle the new security API in their app. Got to work Opera Mobile Browser (native), Screenshot (native), Google Maps (java) - others like ShoZu (java) stop or crash at some point. I'm waiting for the Picostation blogger client to be available for S60 3rd Edition for true live blogging.

Technorati Tags: nokia e70 smartphone

Posted by Cedric at 6/20/2006 12:03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

It is a well known fact that software products that are actively used by its developers are in general better than those not (adding fake data and playing around doesn't count). This methodology to reduce QA efforts is also known as "eating your own dog food" or nicer "drinking your own champagne".

Creating more complex web applications requires constant testing in various browsers. This being a painful problem in the industry for a while, I had to learn - it got a step harder since this year! Your hardly find a web developer that voluntarily use Internet Explorer 6 as it's primary browser. Ignoring the fact that the majority of the web users are still using this so called browser (for generally good reasons), but with the result that sites might not really work fine in IE anymore (without larger QA efforts and longer feature development times..).

How to solve this? You can't force anybody to use IE as primary browser?

What will happen in 2 years.. still left with legacy 50% IE6 usage? I guess I need to hire a I-forever-love-IE6-QA-Hero to rest my nerves...

Technorati Tags: qualityassurance ie6 testing

Posted by Cedric at 6/15/2006 11:31:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

I don't have the time and resources to do it - therefore here's the business idea for free (for any European county):

1. Call up Atlassian and make a deal to contribute the internationalised Confluence version in your home language (should be easy with version 2.2+)
2. Scrap the WCM/CMS/Portal solutions in your portfolio
3. Train your tech team in customising templates, writing plug-ins and using the API of Confluence (e.g. build a nice Word editing plug-in)
   
4. Build some nice Intranet and Extranet templates
5. Train your sales and consulting fellows to do fancy demos
6. Don't sell it as Enterprise Wiki! - sell it as Intranet & Extranet solution for small and mid-size companies.
7. Get some happy customers

Don't know Confluence? - try a demo.

Having worked as Technical Product Manager for a known Enterprise CMS vendor - I now enjoy using Confluence day-by-day.

It provides a surprisingly fresh view on corporate content management challenges. Examples are the nice way to manage department news with the built-in blogging features (write news in the different spaces=department/team and aggregate them on the corporate level) - managing navigation based on hierarchies (traditional) and taxonomy based (tags). Built-in simple Document/Asset Management, export articles as PDF or Word and neat versioning (articles and docs). Finally full-text search on the whole content repository (incl. docs)... and yes.. of course it's easy to deploy and update.... to name a few.

And no... I don't get money from Atlassian to say that ;-)

Happy filling out "out-of-the-box" in the RFPs.

Update: Thanks for picking up the post...

Technorati Tags: confluence atlassian cms intranet

Posted by Cedric at 6/11/2006 09:10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

At local.ch we make quite some use of techniques today best known under the name of AJAX. The main motivation to do so was that web applications built with the default options of HTML are plain and don't really enjoy using. I guess the best example is the drop down selection for large lists of items.. (aka the Country Selection). Different approaches to extend the feature set or improve user experience on HTML web application (Java-applet, Active-X, Flash, DHTML, XForms, Web Forms 2.0, ...) has come up since the invention of HTML forms - and now finally one of them (more precise: a combination of them) has the magic mix to make the cut.

Reasons (top of my head):

1. build on existing and well-known technologies (Javascript)
2. easy to copy & paste
3. easy to add into an existing site

At local.ch we made use of AJAX to:

1. reduce complete reloads of the web page. e.g. for paging and refining the result set or look-up large lists
2. reduce user typos by recommend possible valid values in input fields e.g. the where and when search fields
3. and of course the map

Some of the guys that are working on local.ch are going to share their knowledge at the upcoming AJAX Conference (June 20-21. 2006, Zurich, Switzerland). I'm going to be there the 2nd day (in listen only mode).

Update: Photos of the event on Flickr

Technorati Tags: ajax localch conference

Posted by Cedric at 6/11/2006 11:24:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post