The W3C XForms Working Group has published a new Working Draft of XForms 1.0 that "incorporates new material agreed upon at the Boston face to face meeting, including the adoption of XML Schema to replace XForms Simple Syntax, as well as initial efforts at modularizing XForms and additional feedback from outside sources. XForms are the W3C's response to demands from Web applications and eCommerce solutions, which require Web forms with richer interactions. XForms are the successor to XHTML forms, and benefit from the lessons learned in the years of HTML forms implementation experience. The specification represents extended analysis, followed by the creation of a new platform-independent markup language for online interaction between an XForms Processor and a remote entity. More flexible than previous HTML and XHTML form technologies, the new generation of Web forms called 'XForms' separates purpose, presentation, and data. The specification introduction includes a brief tutorial on XForms and a discussion of design principles behind XForms. Core chapters contain the XForms reference manual. The bulk of the reference manual consists of the specification of XForms. This reference defines what may go into XForms and how XForms Processors must interpret the various components in order to claim conformance. Appendixes contain a normative description of XForms described in XML Schema, information on optional function libraries, references, a change history, and other useful information."
Bibliographic information: XForms 1.0. W3C Working Draft 08-June-2001. Edited by Micah Dubinko (Cardiff), Josef Dietl (Mozquito Technologies), Roland Merrick (IBM), Dave Raggett (W3C/Openwave), T. V. Raman (IBM), Linda Bucsay Welsh (Intel). Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/. Available as single/large file and .ZIP archive.
The 'Key Goals of XForms' include: "(1) Support for handheld, television, and desktop browsers, plus printers and scanners; (2) Richer user interface to meet the needs of business, consumer and device control applications (3) Decoupled data, logic and presentation (4) Improved internationalization (5) Support for structured form data (6) Advanced forms logic (7) Multiple forms per page, and pages per form (8) Suspend and Resume support (9) Seamless integration with other XML tag sets."
