Slashdot Mirror
Form Filling Through Office 12
Qa32 writes "For those chomping at the bit for more Office 12 details, Microsoft offered a tiny peek at the upcoming offering, or offerings, due next year. In what he termed the first public viewing of Office 12, Chris Caposella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, showed off a distributed forms capability that would enable customers to fill in and submit XML forms easily via a browser, without having to run Microsoft InfoPath on their PC."
InfoPath is one of the programs in one of the Microsoft Office 2003 packages. It allows XML form creation and editing; you can create forms that people could fill out online.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
InfoPath works independently from XForms, although the aim is similar, to convert user input to XML. Companies that have deployed Office 2003+ would most likely use InfoPath. Companies that haven't would most likely implement XForms.
InfoPath is a product which allows you to create XML documents which you can email to each other. These documents act like HTML forms when opened in the InfoPath environment. Users can then fill out the form and the data gets posted somewhere like to a webservice.
My opinion is that it is basically like a form on a web page, except less functional, and harder to develop. MS has taken the easiest part of web development (making forms out of INPUT tags) and made it much harder by wrapping a WYSIWYG editor around it. This is yet another attempt to allow the unwashed masses to design their own web forms for data manipulation. I think it is a massive failure so far since it only addresses the most trivial part of web development. And I'm no MS hater.