W3C XForms Interactive Web Services; Powerful Client-side Interfaces Micah Dubinko Dave Navarro David Cleary

A Brief History of Web Forms 1993:HTML forms 1994–2000:Nothing happened Today:XForms

HTML Forms Limitations Some Assembly Required Primitive Data Representation Urlencoded? Ugh. Need Script to do anything… Validations Calculations Dynamic Forms

Interactive Web Services Some Assembly Required Primitive Data Representation Urlencoded? Ugh. Blending Purpose and Presentation etc… No validations, calculations XML In, XML Out Integration with Web Services; XML Tools Leverage XPath, XML Schema, XSLT, SVG Any Time, Any Place, and on Any Device

How It Works XSLT XForms <> Source treeInstance data Stylesheet tree XForms Processing XSLT Processing

XForms User Interface

XForms Model

Defines the ‘Purpose’ of the form Includes the following: Instance Data Submit Information XML Schema Information XForms specific properties and actions Model and Instance can be synthesized

XForms Instance Provides template for your data Provides default or partially submitted data Can be inline or referenced externally

XForms Schema Support Full XML Schema can be inline or externally referenced Schema fragments can be inline Create user defined datatypes Instance data can be annotated with type information Client validates simple types, not structure

XForms Conformance Profiles Two conformance profiles to support wide range of devices Basic includes subset of XML Schema datatypes Full includes complete XML Schema support

XForms Constraints XML Schema defines static contraints XForms extends these with ‘computed expressions’ Evaluated at runtime Is something relevant or required? Calculated fields

XForms Actions Defines common set of behaviors for forms Based on XML Events specification Allows event processing without requiring Javascript

XForms Submit Info Provides How, Where, and What to submit Multiple models per form Partial form submission Default is ‘post’ of XML Instance

Help Make XForms Better! XForms “Smoke Tests” Containing Document Schema Vote For XForms in Mozilla!

Try Out XForms Implementations: X-Smiles Mozquito Apache Cocoon Chiba ExFormula Authoring Tools Cardiff LiquidOffice (demo)

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