XML for forms

[Tim Bray]

At 11:36 AM 7/5/99 -0400, David Megginson wrote:

>I agree -- it's a small (from an enterprise perspective) but useful
>niche market: quite large enough to keep JetForm and a couple of
>competitors busy (and wealthy) for a while, 

Actually, in recent times the vendors have been struggling.  It's
an interesting area of work though - the notion that you can finalize
a weighty legal transaction (loan application, purchase order) by
filling in an HTML form and sending a bunch of context-free name/value
pairs to port 80 somewhere is pretty deeply inconsistent with business
culture as we know it, which relies on the ability to resolve
business disputes with litigation dependent on the paper trail.  I'm
not asserting that the Web can't support this kind of thing, I'm just
dubious that the HTTP POST operation as now practiced provides the 
necessary infrastructure. -T.

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