I was in Fremont yesterday speaking on a panel hosted by the Silicon Valley Webbuilder group on wikis and usability. Jeffrey Walker, the President of of Atlassian, was there. Jeffrey has this unusual quality. I don’t know how to describe it other than the dude’s so damn like-able you just want to give him a hug. The panel moderator was LukeW. I don’t recall his last name. He’s a usability and user experience (UeX) dude who’s currently working at Yahoo!. He seemed like he might be new to wikis, but it was clear he’s a smart dude and during his, albeit a tad long, 
introduction to UeX he made some really good points about web forms and usability. I actually wrote down a couple things Luke said. He has a book coming out on UeX and web form design. This is his second book. I will be buying it. Like I said, smart dude. Maybe someone can post an URL to it in the comments for all of us. Bess Ho, the organizer was a trip. Very energetic, fun, and memorably dressed. She was dressed straight out of an anime, down to the sneakers. She has a fabulously original business card that she proudly declared she had designed herself. Finally, Zoli helped Bess find speakers for the event and was in attendance. Hungarians are cool. Zoli is no exception.
Aaron Roe(bot) Fulkerson Open source entrepreneur and digital viking.
About Me
I am a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of MindTouch, a popular open source business application and collaboration platform used by millions. Read more.
Wiki panel on Usability
September 27, 2007 — Aaron FulkersonFight over 'forms' clouds future of Net applications | Tech News on ZDNet
February 19, 2005 — Aaron FulkersonThis 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.
