What's up with XForms

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What's up with XForms
Ed Tittel

One of the major motivations driving Web designers and developers away from HTML and into the arms of XML is the latter's ability (in theory, at least) to support much richer, more capable forms. Those who understand how markup vocabularies like XSLT can already perform data validation, support data typing, and work with all kinds of text and numeric data should appreciate how an equally rich set of datatypes, validation techniques, and so forth, would make Web-based forms easier to design, build, and use.

XForms is the name of the W3C initiative that's supposed to deliver on this promise, and according to a report from Steven Pemberton, chair of the W3C XForms Working Group, that promise is getting ever near to reaching fruition. On April 2, 2003, Pemberton released his "Report on the XForms Implementation Workshop, 27th/28th February 2003" wherein he states the following:

For more details from this report, read it online.

The Working Group is working to identify

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an XForms Basic subset (that works much like the XHTML Basic subset in defining a small, broadly applicable set of functionality for mobile devices). They are also working out remaining issues that will allow the XForms 1.0 specification (and the XForms Basic subset) to reach recommended draft specification status -- and thereby become available to the XML community at large in stable form.

To learn more about XForms design work, capabilities, and related products and technologies, visit one or more of the following resources:

While XForms isn't quite completely cooked yet, it's something any serious XML professional should starting learning about. Once it is ready, it will surely appeal to anyone who needs to solicit and manage user input through Web pages.

About the Author

[IMAGE]Ed Tittel is a 20-plus year veteran of the computing industry, who's worked as a programmer, manager, systems engineer, instructor, writer, trainer, and consultant. He's also the series editor of Que Certification's Exam Cram 2 and Training Guide series, and writes and teaches regularly on Web markup languages and related topics.

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