XForms Becomes Proposed Recommendation

leighklotz writes "The W3C has announced that XForms is now a Proposed Recommendation, after certification of one full implementation (open source Java XSmiles from Finland) and two more implementations of each feature (the Internet Explorer plug-in FormsPlayer and the Java standalone Novell xPlorer). XForms is the next generation of forms for the Web, and uses an XML-based three-layer model: data model, data, and user interface. XForms uses CSS for device independencence and is designed for integration into XHTML 2, SVG, and other XML-based markup languages. A host of other implementations are available or in progress, but my pick for most interesting is DENG, which is an XForms to Flash compiler written in Flash. DENG supports XForms, SVG, RSS, XHTML, and CSS. XForms is in consideration for other standards as diverse as Universal Remote Controls and the UK Government Interoperability Framework, and was developed with the participation of IBM, Oracle, Xerox, Adobe, Novell, SAP, Cardiff, PureEdge, and a host of other companies, universities, and invididuals."

Comments

We don't need no backwards compatibility

[Simon Brooke]

Way back in 2000 I had a hard look at how you'd deliver an XForms form to a legacy device, and concluded that it was in the general case virtually impossible using standard tools. So I said so. As far as I know, there's still no way, and no one has produced any sensible response to this problem.

Re:Thank god.

[whereiswaldo]

If Xforms allows the browser to verify fields, doesn't that mean we base our security on trusting the client?

My take on this: if you can validate on the client side, it saves you from having fancy (and tedious to write) code on the server side which repopulates the HTML page and allows the user to fix the problem. You still check for invalid data on the server side, but error messages can be curt and no repopulating forms BS.

All depends on what kind of site you're designing, of course.