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.