W3C XForms

1
W3C XForms

• Interactive Web ServicesPowerful Client-side
  Interfaces

• Micah Dubinko
• Dave Navarro
• David Cleary

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A Brief History of Web Forms

• 1993 HTML forms
• 19942000 Nothing happened
• Today XForms

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HTML Forms Limitations

• Some Assembly Required
• ltinput valueinitial valuegt
• Primitive Data Representation
• Urlencoded? Ugh.
• Need Script to do anything
• Validations
• Calculations
• Dynamic Forms

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Interactive Web Services

• Some Assembly Required
• ltinput valueinitial valuegt
• Primitive Data Representation
• Urlencoded? Ugh.
• Blending Purpose and Presentation
• ltinput typeradio checkboxgt 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

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How It Works
ltgt
Stylesheet tree
XForms Processing
ltgt
ltgt
ltgt
ltgt
XSLT Processing
Source tree
Instance data

• XSLT XForms

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XForms User Interface
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XForms Model
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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

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XForms Instance

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

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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

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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

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XForms Constraints

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

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XForms Actions

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

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XForms Submit Info

• Provides How, Where, and What to submit
• Multiple models per form
• Partial form submission
• Default is post of XML Instance

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Help Make XForms Better!

• XForms Smoke Tests
• Containing Document Schema
• http//dubinko.info/xforms/
• Vote For XForms in Mozilla!
• http//bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id97806

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Try Out XForms

• Implementations
• X-Smiles http//www.xsmiles.org
• Mozquito http//www.mozquito.com
• Apache Cocoon http//xml.apache.org/cocoon/
• Chiba http//sourceforge.net/projects/chiba/
• ExFormula http//sourceforge.net/projects/exformul
  a/
• Authoring Tools
• Cardiff LiquidOffice (demo)
• http//www.Cardiff.com/xforms/

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For More Information

• www-forms_at_w3.org (subj Subscribe)
• http//www.w3.org/TR/xforms/
• http//www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms
• http//www.xml.com/
• http//www.xmml.com/ (SVG site)
• www.zvon.org/xxl/XForms1.0/Output/
• More?