Yahoo! has released Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform sous le nom de « Blueprint » and the news has been widely commented by XForms fans: Micah Dubinko states that “Yahoo! introduces mobile XForms” and Erik Bruchez “Yahoo! goes XForms”
The roadmap published by Yahoo! appears to be much more cautious and just says “Much of Blueprint’s philosophy and syntax comes from XForms”.
The developers’ guide clearly shows that if Yahoo! did borrow elements from the XForms recommendation, these elements do not belong to the XForms namespace, cohabit with elements similarly borrowed to XHTML and elements that are specific to Yahoo! and are declared under a single namespace.
The result seems as different from XForms than WAP Forum’s WML was different from XHTML.
If the defenders of a declarative approach can celebrate the fact that this approach has been preferred by Yahoo! over a more procedural approach based on JavaScript, I think that this is an overstatement to say that this is a success for XForms.
XForms has been designed to be user agent agnostic and the development of a Basic version has even been started for low end terminals.
Mobiles were obviously a target for XForms from the beginning and the adoption by Yahoo! of a not really compatible clone can on the contrary be seen as a new failure.
This is especially regrettable for a technology that has a huge technical potential.
I couldn’t agree more. I was disappointed by this news. In a similar vein, I was a little disappointed when I read that CouchDB supported JSON natively in lieu of XML.
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