XForms 1.1

XForms 1.1

XForms is a new technology being widely adopted by industry: even though it was designed for forms, as the name suggests, it is capable of, and is being used for, much more. It has been adopted by Open Office for use in its ODF Document Format, and Yahoo! has recently announced its use on their new mobile platform Blueprint.

Industry experience is showing that using XForms can greatly reduce the amount of work needed: one company reported that a task that in the past needed 150 person-years needed only 10 person-years with XForms.

The advantages of XForms include:

• It improves the user experience: XForms has been designed to allow much to be checked by the browser, such as types of fields being filled in, or that one date is later than another. This reduces the need for round trips to the server or for extensive script-based solutions, and improves the user experience by giving immediate feedback to what is being filled in.

• It is XML, and it can submit XML.

• It combines existing XML technologies: Rather than reinventing the wheel, XForms uses a number of existing XML technologies, such as XPath for addressing and calculating values, and XML Schemas for defining data types. This has a dual benefit: ease of learning for people who already know these technologies, and implementors can use off-the-shelf components to build their systems.

• It is internationalized.

• It is accessible: XForms has been designed so that it will work equally well with accessible technologies (for instance for blind users) and with traditional visual browsers.

• It is device independent: the same form can be delivered without change to a traditional browser, a PDA, a mobile phone, a voice browser, and even some more exotic emerging clients such as an Instant Messenger. This greatly eases providing forms to a wide audience, since forms only need to be authored once.

• It is easier to author complicated forms.

The presenter is one of the authors of the XForms specifications, and is Forms Activity lead at the W3C.

This tutorial introduces XForms step-by-step. It covers essentially all of XForms except some technical details about events, and no more than a passing reference to the use of Schemas. It particularly deals with what is new in XForms 1.1, which is currently at candidate recommendation phase, and is being implemented for several browsers.

Emphasis is on how to improve the user experience, and how XForms improves accessibility and device independence, and makes the author’s life easy in producing a better experience.