The W3C XForms Working Group has issued a new version of the XForms 1.0 working draft specification, incorporating "new material agreed upon at the Mountain View face-to-face meeting and ongoing feedback from the general public." The working group plans to publish a 'last call' working draft after evaluation of review comments on the current draft. 'XForms' is W3C's name for "a specification of Web forms that can be used with a wide variety of platforms including desktop computers, hand helds, information appliances, and even paper. The current design of Web forms doesn't separate the purpose from the presentation of a form. XForms, in contrast, are comprised of separate sections that describe what the form does, and how the form looks. This allows for flexible presentation options, including classic XHTML forms, to be attached to an XML form definition. The XForms User Interface provides a standard set of visual controls that are targeted toward replacing today's XHTML form controls. These form controls are directly usable inside XHTML and other XML documents, like SVG. An important concept in XForms is that forms collect data, which is expressed as XML instance data; workflow, auto-fill, and pre-fill form applications are supported through the use of collected instance data."

Bibliographic information: XForms 1.0. W3C Working Draft 07-December-2001. Edited by Micah Dubinko (Cardiff), Josef Dietl (Mozquito Technologies), Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. (Xerox Corporation), Roland Merrick (IBM), and T. V. Raman (IBM). Version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xforms-20011207. Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/. Previous version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xforms-20010828. See the HTML format, diff-marked HTML, and zip archive.

From the WD specification: "Forms are an important part of the Web, and they continue to be the primary means of interactivity used by many Web sites. Web applications and eCommerce solutions have sparked the demand for better web forms with richer interactions. XForms are the response to this demand -- extended analysis, followed by the creation of a new platform-independent markup language for online interaction between an XForms Processor and a remote entity. XForms are the successor to HTML forms, and benefit from the lessons learned in the years of HTML forms implementation experience."

From the web site description: "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."