Trip Report WWW2004 XForms

there were approximately 15 attendees.

introduction:

• XForms 1.0 was released in october 2003
• there are about 30 implementations available (native, plug-ins, proxies etc.)
• forms are on the web since many years, but there are problems:
  • no support for different presentation orientations
  • mixture of data and presentation
  • no types
  • rely on scripting
  • bad accessibility
  • no support for non western languages

XForm features:

• seperates data from presentation
• the data is any XML document
• declarative (no scripting required)
• integrates into exisiting data streams such as schemas, SOAP, XML RPC, requires no new server infrastructure
• device independent
• international friendly
• accessible
• not only for forms
• calculate values
• toggle and switch provides wizards like features
• repeat allows to bind to repeating items in an instance. there are also facilities to edit and delete existing data
• model binding properties (it is up to the user agent how to handle these):
  • required
  • constraint (e.g. larger than)
  • dependent (e.g. if payment method is credit card, ask for card number and expiration date, otherwise do nothing or ask for different data)
  • readonly value
  • computed value (e.g. currency conversion)
• multiple submission methods
• after submission: page doesn't have to be replaced, there is a replace after submission function

accessibility:

• user interface designed for cross device, multimodal access
• accessible by design
• controls can be optimized for the target device

security:

• based on XML signature
• a digital signature must cover both, the data and the presentation of the data to be secure (otherwise one of the parties might be "tricked" e.g. by printing white text on white background etc).

see www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ for details.
see FormsPlayer for an XForm plug-in for Internet Explorer V6 (requires also MSXML)

to the trip report main page