It's more about what should we be limiting ourselves too. I know most people use IE out there, but should that really stop us? If we sit back and wait and wait, I dont think anything will come of it.
You should be limiting yourself to tricks & tools which are widely accepted by your audience, or degrade gracefully so that your audience can still access the content/functionality regardless.
AFAIK, XForms does not fit in this category at all, and *I* wouldn't use it on anything less that a corporate intranet with guaranteed support by all clients.
Actually im off the topic of XForms throughout this whole conversation.
Im not so much going to be forcing people who are visiting these sites to use the ideal browser, but if they want an enjoyable experience they would need to use that browser.
You need to clearly define "enjoyable". If you mean "it works", then I think you're headed down the path of inaccessibility. If you mean "works faster/easier/smarter", then sure!
Enjoyable, as in the layout working properly by defined standards and no nasty hacks to make things work, eg, PNG transparency, box model hack, etc.
I just want to get an idea of how many people are inserting hacks into their code to satisfy the older browser department and what are they going to do when a new technology comes around that one browser will never support, but is still the major browser throughout the net.
I generally don't hack for backwards compatibility in the mark-up at all. I do a little CSS hacking, but it's limited to the bare minimum required, and they're clearly defined and separated into their own file for easy recognition and later removal. But you're not talking about hacks on HTML or CSS for backwards compatibility, you're talking about using a technologies which the browser HAS NO CLUE ABOUT. Not good I say.
As stated before, no im not. Im off the topic of XForms as Mozilla doesn't understand this at all and there isn't even a plugin for it (except of course using the flash alternative), but when it is able to be used in Mozilla browsers I will jump on the so called XForms bandwagon, but if Web Forms 2.0 can compete with XForms at a substantial rate and is usable throughout other browsers then I could use this in some places over XForms.
Well, really, Mozilla are pushing for XHTML2 support and I don't think they will let us down. So considering XForms is a part of XHTML2 I think they would consider this a major part to implement. Now if Mozilla are the only ones to implement XHTML2, is it still going to be picked up? Yes.
As for new technologies, it's going to be really tough -- we're *getting there* with support for CSS2, XHTML, etc, but pretty soon browser manufacturers will be far down the path on CSS3, XHTML2 and many other newer technologies, and we'll be looking at an uphill battle once again as we wait for browsers to catch up.
But if we want to cater for as many different browsers in the future we will have to sacrifice standard technologies for old technologies, which at the least are inferior.
And I believe that not only is Mozilla jumping on the W3C bandwagon, but Apple too. Plus its good to see that not only browsers will be adopting XForms and other technologies alike.
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