Well, I’m finally breaking down, giving in, and resigning myself to the necessity of learning *gasp* ASP.NET. I’ve been a PHP guy since 2001—never felt the need or the desire to learn ASP/VBScript, even if it meant having more job opportunities available to me. For me it was a matter of principle—if I can do it with PHP, why do I need to do it with ASP? PHP is free, a great development movement, and can be developed for nearly any platform—windows, un/linux, mac.

Well, the sr web developer in our department has this huge wishlist of what he’d like to do, but just doesn’t have the time to do it. He kinda hinted that I oughtta learn ASP.

So I broke down, bought SAMS Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days. Now we’ll see if I can actually learn it in 21 days. Not exactly thrilled about learning it, but if I can get a competent working knowledge of it, at least I can add that to my resume’s skillset list.

Oh joy. Another M$ developer is being born. Does this mean I have to extend my arm towards Mr. Gates as I goose-walk my way to my cube?

August 11, 2005, 9:16 am

Filed under: Development, \\\ ETC ///
3 Comments

As if there wasn’t enough out there for me to get caught up on—XML, XHTML, AJAX, SOAP, etc. Now there is a new way of handling and presenting forms coming down the pipe called XForms. According to Wikipedia,

“XForms was designed to be the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner to describe any user interface, and even perform simple and common data manipulation tasks.”

So that implies universal form support for any application that supports XML—the ability to create forms and use them universally.

W3 has an overview on some of the parameters and the basic usage of XForms, but by no means is a comprehensive tutorial. What this means, is that down the road us old-school HTML developers are going to have to learn a whole new way of doing HTML and form handling in general.

Supposedly Mozilla will be supporting XForms sometime in August with some sort of patch or new base installation. I’m curious as to how long it’ll take Microsoft to catch on and add support in Internet Explorer for XForms. Unlikely, I’m sure. Our luck we’ll have to create multiple variations to accommodate browser differences.

This certainly looks like a viable way to go with form handling—universal forms that can be formatted with stylesheets (of course, which can be easily varied depending upon the outputting application). Seems like it won’t be long before HTML becomes a veritable thing of the past and the dominant method of formatting becomes a combination of stylesheets and some XHTML tags here and there.

July 19, 2005, 3:30 pm

Filed under: HTML, XML / XHTML, \\\ ETC ///
3 Comments