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

in a nutshell...

[selderrr]

xforms is fully buzzword compliant and serves as an excellent tool for dumb managers to wank with.

WTF? That name is already taken, try again.

[Dr. Zowie]

Jesus Christ, doesn't anyone look out for name collisions anymore? XForms is a GUI toolkit for X., in (slow) development since 1995 and still used in many useful apps like GeomView and Lyx.

Now it's also "the next generation of web forms". Gag me with a buzzword.

It's not as if the original XForms were unknown, either -- it comes up second in a Google search for "Xforms". These jokers should have known better.

Feh.

So many links

[Anonymous Coward]

After all that, I think Bender summed it up best:

"Interesting! No, wait, the other thing. Tedious."

Thank god.

[Duncan3]

I was having a ton of trouble teaching people how to use and . It's good to see that they went and solved the complexity problem.

Maybe they think if they make forms complex enough, and break enough browsers, the cheap labor in India won't take their jobs?

Re:Thank god.

[sketerpot]

The thing about xforms is that I see, lurking underneath the buzzwords and nasty looking XML namespaces (ugh. UGH!), that there is some good technology here. The old HTML forms are okay, but you get the feeling that they are a bit too lightweight. They have no support for input validation, so you either have to do that with server scripting (which is typically a lot of work, and ugly at that), or stick in a bunch of nasty javascript. Xforms looks like a way to give the browser more knowledge about what is supposed to go into the fields, and let it figure out how to get it---what validation to do, and even how to display the forms, which should be very useful on, say, handheld computers. Not all the world uses MSIE 800x600 24 bit monitors, and not all the world can display normal forms that way they're intended to be displayed.

For some good information on how to actually use xforms, go to W3Schools, which also has lots of other stuff. But knock off the buzzwords, people!

Re:Thank god.

[dasunt]

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

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.

Key Feature

[billstr78]

Key Goals of XForms

• 
  
• Support for handheld, television, and desktop browsers, plus printers and scanners
  
• Suspend and Resume support
  

Suspend and Resume. Oh, that'll be usefull for last minute regret when making large online purchaces.

Click here to submit form to purchase $2000 computer... Wait! I changed my mind. Suspend. Suspend. Hmmm... I can always use another computer, Resume!

Not again...

[JessLeah]

Jebus. Every time you look around, they're introducing some new technology designed to help us. (And half the time, it's based around XML.) Am I really the only one left on this planet that believes that assembly language, C, BASIC, Cobol, Fortran, Forth, Pascal, HTML, and Perl are "good enough" for anything, and there's no need for another billion languages, "standards", plug-ins, etc.?

I can make "plain old CGIs written in Perl" jump up and do tricks without any fancy new whizbang technology telling me it's time to re-evaluate the whole way I make Web forms. Not to mention the fact that this is going to be a nightmare to integrate into all of the browsers.

When people started talking about Flash as if it were some sort of an IEEE-blessed, completely open standard, and as if it were available in all browsers, (I'm sorry, but "the most common browsers on the most common operating systems" doesn't count), I knew the Web was going downhill fast. Now we're mired in our own complexity, we have a billion plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc. etc. etc.)... and now they're telling us that plain old <FORM> isn't good enough. Dammit, I want back to 1995 and Slackware 3.0...

an open letter to w3c

[joe_bruin]

dear world wide web consortium,

thank you for your recommendation of yet another over-complicated standard for the world wide web. while we do appreciate the time and effort it takes to keep coming up with esoteric standards that involve the letter 'x', we currently are not searching to implement any additional layers of abstraction into our website viewing experience. we currently have xml backends that are interpreted by xslt's to generate style sheets that are controlled by dhtml, and feel that adding another abstraction layer to what was originally a simple way to serve a formatted text page would take us into the realm of meta-meta-meta-meta-programming, and that's probably two meta's too many for us. we have decided that we would rather spend our time creating interesting content, than debugging at what level our standards-based fancy pants websites are breaking on each browser.

so, while you guys are doing good job there in lotus-eating land, we on the real web will be passing on this standard.

thanks,
the world wide web

Re:an open letter to w3c

[Khomar]

Amen to that. I don't really see anything in the standard that cannot be done with the current technology (except the suspend/resume... but as another poster noted, WHY?!). While this argument is often a bad one in that it can cause one to be stuck in the past forever, in the case of web development, stability is better than progress. The web is finally starting to reach a point (after many, many years of frustration) where everyone is using the same standard and most users have capable web browsers. Yet, just when the job of the web developer is looking to become almost managable, they want to add an entirely new mess that will involve a whole new generation of browser incompatibility and proprietary "features". There just aren't enough compelling reasons to face the compatibility nightmare. Yet another worthless standard...

BTW, what is up with this whole "separate the logic from the interface" kick about. While it is an interesting programming model, I do not see why an entirely new standard is required to support it. This kind of thing is already possible given existing server-side technology. Just wondering.

Re:an open letter to w3c

[irritating environme]

Dude, you forgot the five layers of abstraction on the back-end:

XML-based Web services, connecting to your Application Server layer, which communicates with the Enterprise Application Integration Messaging/Queuing Layers, JDBC abstraction layers, CORBA, DCOM, interpreted/JIT-compiled ByteCode, plus all the TCP/IP messaging it all runs on across the eight servers.

Re:Browsers..?

[jnana]

See the following bugzilla item for XForms support in Mozilla: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97806. There are also plugins available for some present browsers. See the implementations section of http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ for more info.

Re:WTF? That name is already taken, try again.

[SpamJunkie]

Just like Firebird. What really gets me is not the fact that these names have already been taken but that at least two seperate people on earth think these are good names for their projects. Firebird is a bad name and it's only made worse by the Thunderbird project, confusing as hell. One should be called Fire and one Thunder, now that's pretty cool. Except for the fact that Fire is an IM on the Mac.

XForms is a bad name. Sure, it kinda sounds like XHTML. Here's a reality check: XHTML is a bad name. X2 was a bad name for a movie, XP is a bad version number and so is MX. X is a stupid letter. Don't go tacking it onto everything you name just to make it sound cool. A name doesn't make something cool, but it sure can make it sound stupid.

Don't even try to explain that extensible starts with an X instead of an E unless you're speaking in ebonics, and in that case, mad props.

independencence?

[renard]

XForms uses CSS for device independencence...

Here at /. we have human editors for spelling independencence... not to mention English grammar transcendencence... or (my favorite) just plain incoherencence...

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:Just one simple question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, XForms supports combo-boxes

Microsoft InfoPath?

[moosesocks]

While Xforms is great and all M$ already (almost) has a production-ready implementation of their own new form standard in InfoPath, which is part of the yet-to-be-released Office 2003.

I got to test InfoPath myself this week, and found it to be a tool which was intuitive, powerful, easy to use, and standards-compliant.

Yes. The M$ product complied to every widely accepted standard possible. It uses XML almost exclusively, seems to have an extensive API, and uses syntactically correct XHTML wherever it can.

Xforms isn't even a standard yet. Don't bash M$ for not complying to it. In fact, it's quite different than Xforms in that it's designed for MUCH MORE than the web (in fact, I find that it's not really geared twoard the web at all)

So, for now, Microsoft seems to have produced a working next-generation form solution before any of the open groups or competitors. (Note: Windows is by no means my primary OS. I use Linux extensively, as well as Mac OS X, and am typing this from my Mac)

Re:Microsoft InfoPath?

[Nevyn]

So, for now, Microsoft seems to have produced a working next-generation form solution before any of the open groups or competitors.

But it's always easier to make the compromises you want, for what you want, than it is to work with a group and come up with something everyone is happy with. So this isn't a supprise, or even unexpected.

This is big.

[CYwo1f]

I, personally, can't wait until XForms is supported by all the major browsers. I've been planning for it in my web development framework for a few reasons. The benefits of having the browser construct an XML document and submit it back the server are tremendous:

• You get hierarchical data, as opposed to the flat list of query parameters you have today. This makes a huge difference in the expressibility of a form. In fact, the XForms spec outlines some support for, for instance, dynamically adding controls to a form. No more re-submitting because those 3 file upload controls weren't enough for you, extend the form offline via javascript!
• You get to reuse your form handling code to service SOAP requests, too. Instantly.
• Form data can be serialized by the browser or by a more specialized client, and submitted later on (this is the Suspend and Resume another poster mentioned). How about being able to disconnect from the internet, copy that article submission form to your laptop, and fixing all those typos while you wait for that call from your editor? Or even submitting the form via an alternate method, SOAP or even email if your server supports it.
• Accessibility. This isn't something I worry about on a daily basis, but there are many people who do. XForms controls are fairly platform-agnostic, and cater better to those with visual or other disabilities. Plus they're more easily adapted to novel input devices, like a cellphone.

If you're a frustrated web developer itching for a simpler way of living, this may be your ticket. Even today, you should consider supporting XForms on your back end, while translating to the simpler HTML forms for today's web clients. I am.

So much noise, so little signal

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually only come to /. for the news content, so reading this whole thread has depressed me, seeing as how it purports to come from knowledgeable, savvy technical people.

Having followed the development of XForms for the last couple of years, I have to say I'm pretty impressed. For instance, I've seen a stunning demo of an implementation by Oracle, where the same form has been filled in over a PC screen, a mobile phone screen, a regular phone by speaking and being spoken to, and even over an Instant Messenger buddy. The same form not different forms that do the same thing, or different forms generated from a central hybrid. People, you cannot do that with HTML forms. Until you understand the power of having a live XML instance in your form, you haven't understood the power of XForms.

Go and look at the Google search example on FormsPlayer.com and tell me that's not cool; or the live map search with XSmiles.

I know it's tough, just when you've got your head round HTML, Javascript, the DOM and all that stuff, to be told that there is something new coming that also has to be learnt, but please don't go judging it because of its name, TLA's, the fact that the spec is hard to read, or that it's new until you've actually seen it in action and tried it out.

I've been told that no other W3C spec has had so many implementations before it was even a recommendation. I think that that fact alone means we should take it seriously and try to evaluate it rationally.

This is really a good thing

[duncanFrance]

I'm surprised at the number of negative posts I've seen already.

This is actually a good thing. HTML forms are badly broken at every level, as anyone who has actually tried to build a decent UI with them will know.

I have been using the draft specification for a while to produce forms in my software and it is useful because it lets me write code (PHP) which produces XFORMS XML, without worrying about how it will look. I then pass the XML through a transform and end up with good old html. Because the actual layout is produced by a transform, I can let my designers choose which transform they want to use to get the kind of prettiness they like. I can get complex layout, with sexy results, without having to write hideous html or wrangle with the cruft that is CSS each time.

That's just the layout side of things. The three-level model give me much more control over adding scripting behaviours (Javascript), abstracting the form control out into PHP classes etc. etc.

If you don't understand why html forms are broken, I suggest you start playing with Xforms. Once you grok it you won't look back. When I first came across Xforms, I thought "great, loads of complexity for no good reason" too.

Re:How will this change things?

[bwt]

Some of the key advantages will be:
1) decouple data, logic, and presentation
2) allow client side rules-based validation
3) spits back an XML record, maybe w/ schema validation
4) replaces a lot of javascript with markup
5) highly device independent (eg render an XForm via telephone, web browser, handheld)