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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

> Vendors in that market heavily use extension mechanisms. For instance commanders of infantry units might fill out forms every day about what kind of contacts they had with the enemy and get them sent to a central location.

How does XMPP help with this over a HTTP form?

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On the battlefield you don't have good internet so the cycle of GET the HTML form and POST the fields is not reliable.

XMPP Forms are deeply asynchronous. I'd assume that the "blank form" already exists on the soldier's laptop and the message gets stored-and-forwarded until it gets to the destination.

Isn't this just an issue of saving the POST until you successfully deliver it?

HTML is an async protocol. We pretend it is sync through a mountain of cookies. But innately, HTTP and HTML are all async. Without PHPSESSID, there really isn't an official way to correlate GETs with POSTs.

XMPP is synchronous. It's a chat interface. I'd assume it's be harder to do async comms with it. IIRC, it's a stream of XML that coincides with the servers state.

HTTP would be fine as well, you could GET an XML with the form to fill and POST the XML with form data.

But: - HTTP forms might be less flexible when it is about structured data. - HTML needs a complex renderer software

Remember that this stuff might need to work on low resource devices and over low bandwidth connections.

Sounds similar to WinLink forms on ham radio, used to make sending structured data easier: https://www.winlink.org/WinlinkExpressForms

I happen to have been an avid user of the Lynx web browser. A long time ago yes but I still remember it.

HTML forms are pretty flexible and could be designed in a low CPU environment.

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