Brendan Eich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > Bryan W. Taylor wrote:
> Mozilla Foundation has actually talked to many enterprise companies, > both "I/T end user" and ISV or I/T supplier, including those that have > supported XForms -- including those who helped fund the development of > the spec in the w3c process. The consistent answer is "no". I imagine you would have got a similar reaction in the early 1990's if you asked companies if they planned to deploy HTML. Deployment interest is a lagging indicator for IT progress, sort of like employment is a lagging indicator for the econony. By the way, what was the question that they said "no" to exactly? > Most companies have Windows desktop fleets and use IE, and they would > not switch to Mozilla just for XForms support. We've talked to dozens > of such companies. Those who care about XForms make up the small, not > obviously growing XForms plugin market. That's the status quo, I agree -- except for the "not obviously growing" part (see below). Breaking the IE stranglehold as the enterprise browser is in many respects a similar sell-job to putting linux on the desktop (hard, not impossible). It's even a bit easier than linux on the desktop for two reasons: first using mozilla does not require them to "switch", since both can run side by side on windows, and second the linux desktop doesn't run IE at all, so desktop linux does require a switch. As for XForms specifically, my experience is that companies don't care about new buzzwords until somebody demonstrates the value they offer. Once they see the value, they tend to react quickly. XForms may have been talked about for years within W3C and other circles, but from a deployer's perspective it's only starting to be marketable from respected vendors like Oracle, Novell, IBM, and Apache Cocoon. You are only starting to see the trade journals write articles touting XForms and books appearing about XForms. In an article called "Hands on XForms", Micah Dubinko summarized the state of XForms well: "XForms has made vast strides in 2003, becoming a technology suitable for production use by early adopters. Already, businesses are using XForms to produce real documents similar to the one shown in this article. The combination of an open standard with a wide variety of both free and commercial browsers makes a powerful business case for deploying XForms solutions." http://www.sys-con.com/xml/article.cfm?id=686&count=10327&tot=3&page=3 _______________________________________________ mozilla-layout mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-layout
