gabo's ramblings down south

I used to work on a server side xforms implementation back in 2002, in a java software shop, so I used to read everyday the spec, and follow the evolution (or the lack of it) in the w3c process.

The separation between logic and presentation, defining forms once and deploy to multiple devices, all the abstraction involved, all very promising features, and yet the thing never took off.

What happened? The idea behind the whole thing seemed really good, we were bringing light to this world. I understand there are some implementations out there, but the big players never really bought the idea.

Now I'm facing a design decision, I have to pick an xml format to define forms in a browser agnostic way and I'm not sure which way to go in the middle of the RIA's war (XAML vs Flash MX vs JavaFx).

The spirit of the spec seems to be right for what I need, yet the industry is clearly not backing the spec. Look at the following Google Trends query...