Meditation on Infopath

Infopath is a weird thing. Think­ing about it is like star­ing at the soul of Microsoft, I think. Con­fused, try­ing to be help­ful, but to a group of peo­ple that are increas­ingly iso­lated and change-averse.

It’s a form sys­tem that stores the data in xml, for use by web appli­ca­tions, or more real­is­ti­cally Share­point Server. Busi­nesses need to make forms, and Share­point only has lim­ited sup­port for this, so obvi­ously the answer is another appli­ca­tion to cre­ate forms, that will inter­face with Share­point. Because no one has thought or had this prob­lem before, right? No one has ever needed to make a form on the web until Share­point came along, and helped everyone.

It’s just weird. Maybe this is a text­book case of esca­la­tion of com­mit­ment. The idea that you need to throw up some web form, and that infopath is the tool for you seems like a huge weird leap to me. You have to have it installed (even to fill a form out!), and it’s not free, you prob­a­bly need Share­point, which is also not free, and func­tion­ally does every­thing much more poorly than, say, medi­awiki, or knowl­edge tree. So instead of a sim­ple server side client-agnostic approach, you would take the exact oppo­site, and sac­ri­fice functionality?

Now for the med­i­ta­tion. Peo­ple use this.

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