This week, a breakaway faction of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) said its work on the Web Forms 2.0 specification is nearly done and put out a call for final comments. The splinter group, which includes browser makers Apple Computer, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, calls itself WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.

What!? No, WHAT-WG!!

The battle illustrates chronic fissures in the politics of Web technology development, with substantial consequences for the continued relevance of open standards in electronic forms–a ubiquitous tool that’s used to gather information on the Web and in other digital applications.

WHAT! YEEEAH, WHAT! (I feel like Lil’ John)

WHAT-WG members say the forms dispute illustrates a larger conflict over whether the W3C should proceed in a “revolutionary” mode, tackling problems from square one and coming up with technically elegant solutions–even if that results in the loss of backward-compatibility with older browsers–or an “evolutionary” mode, maintaining older technologies like HTML 4 and extending the usefulness of current browsing software.

“This gets to the question of what the W3C is all about,” Lie said. “Is it about making revolutions all the time? Do we kill all the sheep and start with goats? Or should the W3C maintain older specs like CSS and HTML?”

Aaron says: ‘evolve it.’ We are still hacking at CSS an ‘older’ spec to get cross browser support. Offer a less elegant alternative that will facilitate an extension of existing capabilities plus ease of use/adoption. It may not scale quite as well, but no one is saying abandon Xforms. At least, I’m not. There was a time I would gun for the most elegant/scalable solution. These days I guess I am just more cynical. As a side note, I recall Alan talking smack about this meeting a year+ ago when he came back from the conference where this all started going down. He is firmly in the Xforms camp. He has always been less about pragmatism and more about semantic rigor, which in general so am I, but not so much on the web. This is only because rigor on the web seems to be the equivalent of jumping through flaming hoops with no audience. Meaning, in general the only benefit you reap is that of being able to pat yourself on the back.