July 19, 2005
XForms — The New Future of Forms
As if there wasn’t enough out there for me to get caught up on—XML, XHTML, AJAX, SOAP, etc. Now there is a new way of handling and presenting forms coming down the pipe called XForms. According to Wikipedia,
“XForms was designed to be the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner to describe any user interface, and even perform simple and common data manipulation tasks.”
So that implies universal form support for any application that supports XML—the ability to create forms and use them universally.
W3 has an overview on some of the parameters and the basic usage of XForms, but by no means is a comprehensive tutorial. What this means, is that down the road us old-school HTML developers are going to have to learn a whole new way of doing HTML and form handling in general.
Supposedly Mozilla will be supporting XForms sometime in August with some sort of patch or new base installation. I’m curious as to how long it’ll take Microsoft to catch on and add support in Internet Explorer for XForms. Unlikely, I’m sure. Our luck we’ll have to create multiple variations to accommodate browser differences.
This certainly looks like a viable way to go with form handling—universal forms that can be formatted with stylesheets (of course, which can be easily varied depending upon the outputting application). Seems like it won’t be long before HTML becomes a veritable thing of the past and the dominant method of formatting becomes a combination of stylesheets and some XHTML tags here and there.
July 19, 2005, 3:30 pm
Filed under: HTML, XML / XHTML, \\\ ETC ///
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Jamison said,
July 19, 2005 @ 4:10 pm
XForms actually aren’t anything new. I was looking into them about 3 years ago, but there wasn’t anything that supported them yet.
Michael said,
July 20, 2005 @ 7:59 am
I should have clarified that XForms isn’t exactly brand new, but the first time that I’ve heard of it.
As far as support is concerned, Mozilla is on the heels of supporting it inherently, and there are a number of other active-x type components that are being built to handle XForms.
avernet said,
July 21, 2005 @ 4:35 pm
Hi Michael: it is an honor to see you quote the XForms article on Wikipedia as I wrote part of that article :).
Jamison: you are right, XForms has been around for a while. What I think is interesting right now is that there is a huge interest in Ajax from developers and an increased recognition of the Ajax benefits from architects and “deciders”. A lot of the things you can do in Ajax, you could do as well with XForms. The benefit of Ajax over XForms is that it is deployed everywhere, but the drawback is that writing Ajax applications is much more complex.
Here come server-side implementations of XForms that transform the code you write in XForms to Ajax code that runs on mainstream browsers. The open source Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS) is example. See some of the example deployed online like Translate This or the XForms Calculator. And hey, as it is open source (LGPL), you can of course download it (look for the 3.0 beta that contains Ajax XForms implementation).
Alex