XForms is an XML format for the specification of a data processing model for XML data and user interface(s) for the XML data, such as web forms. 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 or with presentation languages other than XHTML to describe a user interface and a set of common data manipulation tasks.
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Orbeon participated in the XForms face-to-face meeting at Google. See this Open Source at Google blog entry for more details. ...www.orbeon.com/blogSitePoint " Cross-browser XForms
... Cross-browser XForms ... On Software " SitePoint Blogs " Cross-browser XForms Says: October 27th, 2005 ... SitePoint Blogs " Mozilla XForms Project threatened ...www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/10/27/cross-browser-xforms/Why XForms Matter, Revisited - O'Reilly XML Blog
A profound change is likely about to shake up your world if you're a web developer, one that I suspect will make the recent efforts in the AJAX space pale in ...www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/03/why_xforms_matter_revisi...blog | planet XForms
blog. browsers. philip-fennell. xforms. xml. XRX ... blog. john-boyer ... terms, a blog post from late last year on Talking to C-Level Execs about XForms. ...planetxforms.org/blogs?page=1blogs | XForms processor from formsPlayer
Mark Birbeck's blog. A better XForms news service ... Mark Birbeck's blog. Skimming, and an Open Source project for a GData XForms client ...www.formsplayer.com/blogXForms is an XML format for the specification of a data processing model for XML data and user interface(s) for the XML data, such as web forms. 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 or with presentation languages other than XHTML to describe a user interface and a set of common data manipulation tasks.
XForms, much like XHTML 2.0 which is currently under development and within which XForms will be embedded, differs from previous versions of XHTML.
XForms 1.0 (Third Edition) was published on 29 October 2007. The original XForms specification was made an official W3C Recommendation on 14 October 2003.
XForms 1.1, which introduces a number of improvements, reached the status of W3C Candidate Recommendation on 29 November 2007.
Differences from HTML forms
Unlike the original HTML forms, the creators of XForms have used a Model-View-Controller approach. The "model" consists of one or more XForms models describing form data, constraints upon that data, and submissions. The "view" describes what controls appear in the form, how they are grouped together, and what data they are bound to. CSS can be used to describe a form's appearance.
An XForms document can be as simple as an HTML form (by only specifying the submission element in the model section, and placing the controls in the body), but XForms includes many advanced features. For example, new data can be requested and used to update the form while it is running, much like using XmlHttpRequest/AJAX except without scripting. The form author can validate user data against XML Schema data types, require certain data, disable input controls or change sections of the form depending on circumstances, enforce particular relationships between data, input variable length arrays of data, output calculated values derived from form data, prefill entries using an XML document, respond to actions in real time (versus at submission time), and modify the style of each control depending on the device they are displayed on (browser versus mobile versus text only, etc.). There is often no need for any scripting with languages such as JavaScript.
Like legacy forms, XForms can use various non-XML submission protocols (multipart/form-data, application/x-www-form-urlencoded), but a new feature is that XForms can send data to a server in XML format. XML documents can also be used to prefill data in the form. Because XML is a standard, many tools exist that can chop and modify data upon submission, unlike the case with legacy forms where in general the data needs to be parsed and manipulated on a case by case basis. XForms is itself an XML dialect, and therefore can create and be created from other XML documents using XSLT. Using transformations, XForms can be automatically created from XML Schemas, and XForms can be converted to legacy XHTML forms: this is basically how server side XForms work today.
