FormCamp Munich, Protocol

Jens Meiert, January 17, 2007 / June 16, 2008.

This entry is filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Usability.

Rough FormCamp follow-up and summary (wiki, photos):

Goal, Location, and Participants

The FormCamp was initiated to think about ways to standardize and simplify usable and accessible online forms and their creation (see details below). It was held in Yahoo’s Munich office. (Many thanks to Yahoo and especially Holger Haslbeck who guaranteed a beautiful work environment.)

Participants, in alphabetical order:

Day 1 – January 13, 2007

Introduction.
Discussion, including the following key points:
- Goal is to come up with a nice “form framework”, a neat form generator, and clever documentation;
- the framework should ignore XForms and Web Forms, due to
- focus on existing implementations and possibilities;
- validation is essential, on both server and client side;
- testing is critical – no “clearance” without successful user tests;
- definition problems (users, scope, …) are tolerated due to lack of consensus …
Excursus on JSON.
Working group formation:
- Semantics group;
- validation group;
- styling group (later, markup and validation need to be defined first).
Excursus on form examples (presented by Gerrit, Jörn, Wolfgang, and Mike), including remarks that
- complex forms could easily be split into smaller field sets;
- radio buttons labeled “yes” and “no” should be replaced by a simple checkbox (for example, “are you human?” followed by a checkbox).
Group work:
- “Best practice” proceeding by defining HTML first;
- definition of wk CSS “pseudo namespace” to make sure that forms can be used in any context;
- action (writing code).

Day 2 – January 14, 2007

Review of first output.
Discussion, including:
- Sense and nonsense of “Reset” and “Cancel” buttons (thus dropped);
- CSS id and class name consistency.
Group work.
Definition of next steps:
- Issue management (Trac) and versioning system (Subversion) setup;
- new working group mailing lists to enable further, dedicated work;
- trying to get things done within the next weeks …

Notes

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) easy to get much consensus on certain issues, but that’s not necessarily surprising. From my point of view, missing definitions already became a major problem though: Starting with simple forms, addressing needs of beginners, or sticking with documentation would massively affect the work that has to be done and might thoroughly facilitate and accelerate the process. Nonetheless, the amount of experience being involved in the project definitely gives hope to present a high-quality outcome soon. Be curious to the next FormCamp post.

Enjoy the most popular posts, probably including:

Comments

On January 17, 13:42 CET, xwolf said:

Thank you for the overview.

I think you are right with your hope for a a high-quality outcome. (But maybe not with the “soon”).
We made the basic thoughts that are absolutely needful for creating the framework. Even it looks as if there are not much results yet, these basic thoughts and discussions are very important to built on.

Jens Meiert