Re: Standards development (was HTML forms)
On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 23:05:01 PST, Walter Ian Kaye [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: And to do so does not necessarily require building an entire browser. Since the input "widget" is just one part of a page, you only need to prototype that one widget. You can do it in any RAD environment. Make a background image that looks like part of a web page if you like, and put your widget onto it. Build in your behaviors, then upload it to the 'Net for people to try out. Bonus points if you can deploy to multiple platforms (REALbasic is good;). Extra bonus points if, while designing the widget, you keep straight the distinction between "implementation and user interface" (what the user sees, using THIS GUI toolkit, on THIS system), and "protocol" (what string of bytes *on the network* is sent to/from your black-box widget). There's a distinction between protocol and API. A lot of different browsers have implemented the HTML selectoptionoption/select construct, and they LOOK and BEHAVE differently for the UI, but the octets on the wire are the same. Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech
RE: Standards development (was HTML forms)
Jony,
Thanks for your message:
In my experience, the proper way to develop standards is to
begin with a private implementation.
Private? Anyone is welcome to my Mozilla mods if they will
try to port them to Gecko. Most browsers already implement
file upload. The only difficulty is in interfacing form
elements to various device drivers. Even though that does
sound terribly difficult, it really doesn't have to be. One
of the most useful extensions,
input type=file device=console accept=text
as shown in the examples, is intended to launch an external
file editor on a workstation, when its corresponding widget
is selected. There is no reason that couldn't be used for
microphone upload, with the widget ("Browse..." replaced
with "Record...") launching the system's standard audio
recording 'accessory' application. The concept is proven,
but the browser producers do not seem at all likely to
provide their implemetations without affirmative advocacy
and authority of the W3C, or the IETF.
The WebTV Plus had implemented 8000 (8-bit) sample per second
audio microphone upload in late 1997. Though I did the spec
there, to this day I don't know who in WebTV engineering did
the actual implementation or the documentation you can read
in the WebTV Plus FAQ.
Cheers,
James
RE: Standards development (was HTML forms)
In my experience, the proper way to develop standards is to begin with a private implementation. Only with practical experience can sufficient understanding be achieved to enable the writing of a good standard. Nearly all prevalent standards have followed this course, including HTML. An example of writing the standard first is OSI. Jony -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 11:47 PM To: James P. Salsman Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: HTML forms On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 13:03:07 PST, "James P. Salsman" said: is assured on almost all controversial matters. The W3C, however, constrains meaningful debate to those willing and able to pay US$50,000 per year. I agree that there was a point in the early development of web standards when that constraint was beneficial. Now, however, with Netscape owned by a company Why was it beneficial then? shipping MSIE, and the stagnation or regression of the core HTML standards, along with the concerns raised in Norman Solomon's article, I believe the time has come to return certain aspects And why is it non-beneficial now, given the apparent complexity of getting a product shipped (look at the current state of Mozilla)? Let's face it - anybody who intends to ship a working browser will need to have enough programmers that the $50K is the least of the problems. Yes, this cuts Mozilla out unless somebody pays for their membership. On the other hand, are there any other *real* contenders for whom $50K would be a hardship? of the control of HTML to the IETF. Even if that view is not shared by the IETF, I the only way I would not be certain that a debate on the topic would be healthy for the Internet communty would be if the W3C were to take an affirmative stand on issues involving microphone upload for language instruction and asyncronous audio conferencing. Umm.. Microphone upload is the *least* of the many challenges facing HTML at the current time. -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech
