Hi, my name is François Faubert.

It’s really surprising to notice how HTML form elements haven’t changed since HTML 4. You can easily think of a ton of better features which could be developed to help the end users and programmers. To me, it is quite bizarre simple things as assigning a label to an <input /> tag can’t be set as an attribute.

Sure, you can use :

<form> <label for="name">Name</label>
    <input id="name" name="name" type="text" />
</form>

But I find manually managing the label feels like a line too many. Another issue is the focusing of a control upon a page’s load event using JavaScript. If you can specify the tabular index of a control, you should also be able to force initial focus on a control using HTML. Keeping in mind the way attributes work in HTML, it could easily be specified the same way you use the selected attribute of a tag.

From the little information available on the W3C, I think Xforms will help a lot, giving a programming feel to building XHTML forms. However, HTML tags should have been reorganized much sooner. As an e-commerce software developer, almost every page I build is actually a big form. There is way too much use of JavaScript to accomplish simple control behavior.

Experience with ASP controls, so little it may be, still showed me they offer a lot more control on the display of web forms. In their programming language, Microsoft was inspired a lot from the way Windows Forms are built. I would also assume JSP can offer the same liberty.

The thing is, I don’t feel it’s the server-side programming language’s job to deal with what seems like first level options for HTML controls. Everyone is putting high hopes in financial success on the Internet nowadays. E-commerce is still expected to become a big fraction of most company sales in the near future. Means of collecting user data under need to be improved if this is to happen.