On 08 Aug 2007, at 18:27, Moshe Weitzman wrote:
Specifically, I want to be able to work with forms without having to know anything about them. I'd like to see us add some semantic metadata to them. Some of this metadata should be (i) human- readable, some of it should be (ii) machine-readable and (iii) some of it should be both.
Such a directory of forms is basically a web services API for the whole site. One can throw POSTS into any of the forms and programmatically retrieve data, change data, etc.
Exactly. And it's currently not as easy as it should/could be. We need some metadata that helps us introspect the forms, and that helps a tool discover how to operate the form without having to know all the nitty details about the data it's working with. We need to abstract that away. For example: if there are 3 submit handlers (3 buttons; one for preview, one to upload a file, and one to submit the form) how do I know which handler to call to save the data? -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/