XForms: The next generation of Web Forms Tyler St. John

What are XForms, and what is their purpose? Classic HTML Web forms don't separate the purpose from the presentation of a form. – Separation of data content and presentation context results in risk of transaction meaning being lost. XForms, in contrast, are comprised of separate sections that describe what the form does (purpose), and how the form looks (presentation). XForms, are designed in a way that separates data definition from user interface definition, and thus lends itself well to more flexible implementation strategies. The W3C has long sought to further that goal with web technologies in general, attempting to separate form from content in web documents

Advantages of XForms Xforms improves the user experience – Xforms has been designed to allow much to be checked by the browser, such as types of fields being filled in, that a particular field is required, or that one date is later than another. This reduces the need for round trips to the server or for extensive script-based solutions, and improves the user experience by giving immediate feedback to what is being filled in. It is XML, and it can submit XML – Xforms is properly integrated into XML: it is in XML, the data it collects in the form is XML, it can load external XML documents as initial data, and can submit the results as XML. By including the user in the XML pipeline, it at last means you can have end-to-end XML, right up to the user’s desktop. It combines existing XML technologies – Rather than reinventing the wheel, Xforms uses a number of existing XML technologies, such as Xpath for addressing and calculating values, and XML Schema for defining data types. This has a dual benefit: ease of learning for people who already know these technologies, and the ability for 4mplementers to use off-the- shelf components to build their systems. It is device independent – The same form can be delivered without change to a traditional browser, a PDA, a mobile phone, a voice browser, and even some more exotic emerging clients such as an Instant Messenger. This greatly eases providing forms to a wide audience, since forms only need to be authored once. It is easier to author complicated forms – Because Xforms uses declarative markup to declare properties of values, and to build relationships between values, it is much easier for the author to create complicated, adaptive, forms, without having to resort to scripting. It is internationalized – Because the data submitted is XML, it is properly internationalized. It is accessible – Xforms has been designed so that it will work equally well with accessible technologies (for instance for blind users) as with traditional visual browsers.

Status of XForms XForms 1.0 is an official recommendation of the W3C. However, XForms 1.1 is still cited as a working draft and is due to be up for an official recommendation some time in 2007 The Xforms Working Group is chaired by John Boyer (IBM) and Steve Pemberton (W3)

When should you use Xforms? At least in the short term, the main benefits of XForms will generally help the developers and not to the users, and will be of most use to those who have a service oriented architecture, rather than an old-fashioned web-site. So trying to 'sell XForms' is probably not only a waste of time, but actually unnecessary--if it fits your system, use it. The following excerpt is taken from Mark Birbeck blog. He is the founding director of x-port.net Ltd., the company behind formsPlayer, one of the most popular implementations of Xforms.