You have little argument from me. It *is* a shame that we are losing one
of the attractions of the Web to applet technologies - the fact that you don't
have to be a computer scientist to author and publish information.
Unfortunately, as far as I see, HTML will never keep up with the constant
demand for new features, despite its extensibility. Today we want numeric
input fields, tomorrow floating-point, next week something else... Applets
fill the gap. I hope to see large libraries of plug-'n'-play applets emerge
that will provide these special features, or at least applet templates that a
non-programmer could quickly adapt to their needs.
The "challenge" for form authors is to cater for _both_ applet-enabled and
non-applet-enabled browsers. It shouldn't be that hard to do, but some
may simply not bother (how many Web pages declare that they "look best when
viewed by <browser name deleted> v1.1"? There's really no need for it,
except laziness).
My $A0.02 worth.
Steve Ball