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The Forms working group is chartered by the W3C to develop the next generation of forms technology for the world wide web. The mission is to address the patterns of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality, and device independence that have become prevalent in Web Forms Applications around the world. The technical reports of this working group have the root name XForms due to the use of XML to express the vocabulary of the forms technology developed by the working group.
The Forms Working Group is comprised of W3C members and invited experts. The Working Group meets weekly by phone. Face to face meetings occur roughly every 3 months and are hosted by member organizations. We are especially interested in people with a rich experience in developing Web forms and supporting tools.
To join, ask your W3C Advisory Committee Representative to use this link to nominate you and agree to the patent policy. Please also have your W3C Advisory Committee Representative send an email to public-forms@w3.org to confirm that your organization is prepared to commit the time and expense involved in participating in the Working Group. You will be expected to attend all Working Group teleconferences and face to face meetings and to respond in a timely fashion to email requests and action items.
2008-12-04: XForms 1.1 implementation reports are now available for the XForms extension for Firefox version 0.8.6 for Firefox 2 and 3.
2008-11-24: Announcing IBM Lotus Forms version 3.5, the latest release of the XForms-powered software suite for designing and deploying high-precision enterprise forms applications and business user data collection applications. Please see the the announcement for furthe details and a link leading to free trial downloads.
2008-10-07: XForms extension for Firefox version 0.8.6 for Firefox 2 and 3 is available for download from http://addons.mozilla.org.
2008-09-19: Best Paper Award. Jack Jansen and Dick Bulterman won the Best Paper award at the 2008 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering for their paper entitled "Enabling Adaptive Time-based Web Applications with SMIL State". The paper presents a very interesting mix of SMIL, XForms and other technologies to enable end-users to customize their experience of content where time dictates the major structure. One example given is of a video bike tour of Amsterdam. Fragments of the video content can be identified and tagged with keywords. During run-time, an XForm is used to allow an end-user to select from the available keywords those which they find interesting, and the corresponding fragments of video are played. Read more.
2008-09-14: Yahoo! announces a development platform to help create standalone XForms applications. Read more.
2008-08-28: XForms Accessibility - Mozilla Developer Center. Assistive technologies API for XForms is supported starting from Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9). Implementation of accessible objects for XForms elements is based on top of the existing object hierarchy introduced in the Mozilla accessibility module. XForms elements behavior is implemented in accordance with accessible toolkit checklist. http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Accessibility/XForms
2008-08-27: XRX: Simple, Elegant, Disruptive. A meme gathering momentum on the Web is "XRX" - XForms on the client, REST interfaces, XQuery on the server. One posting was by Dan McCreary on xml.com which contained the memorable quote
Traditional methods required approximately 40 inserts into separate tables within a relational database. The use of XForms and eXist resulted in one line of XQuery code:
store(collection, file, data)That was it. Simple. Elegant. I was hooked.
The meme has been popping up elsewhere. For instance, see XRX at Wikibooks, and XRX: Performing Updates at O'Reilly. Other links to the same ideas, though without using the XRX name are: XForms and eXist: A Perfect Couple and XForms, REST, XQuery...and skimming.
2008-05-25: Orbeon announces Orbeon Form Builder which allows you to build forms right from your browser and aims at taking the pain out of building them. It is 100% open source, standards-based, and built on top of the Orbeon Forms XForms implementation.
An alpha version is currently available to developers for testing and feedback. You can download it as part of the Orbeon Forms nightly builds. More information on the Orbeon Form Builder product page.
2008-03-10: XForms Tutorial and Cookbook has been made a featured book on Wikibooks because "it contains substantial content, it is well-formatted, and the Wikibooks community has decided to feature it on the main page or in other places."
2008-03-08: Manchester City Council: Delivering 'best local council web site in Britain' "[Manchester City Council]'s recent recognition by the BT Online Excellence Awards (an award driven by user choice), as the best local government site in Britain, further demonstrates the high level of user satisfaction being achieved, placing MCC's web site in the same league as Google, Amazon and the BBC. The public is also making greater use of the online self service aspect of council services, with a significant increase in the submission of online forms. This has been enabled by the Jadu XForms Professional platform, which is fully integrated with Jadu CMS and provides more streamlined processing of forms."
2008-01-07: Yahoo! announced its strategy to foster a mobile ecosystem and deliver the best mobile internet experience to billions of consumers. The underlying technology for delivering on this strategy is the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform, which includes XForms.
2007-11-29: XForms 1.1 is now a Candidate Recommendation. Many implementations already support a number of XForms 1.1 features, as described in the preliminary implementation report. In the upcoming months, implementers from the working group will be working on their implementation reports, which are needed to advance to Proposed Recommendation.
2007-10-29: XForms 1.0 Third Edition has now made it through the W3C process and become a Recommendation. This version of the specification contains 343 "diffs" that have significantly hardened XForms for enterprise deployment. The diff-marked version of the specification appears here.
2007-10-12: IDEAlliance has now announced the XForms Evening at the XML Conference. This event brings together a number of the leaders in the XForms community to present the business value of XForms, including design experience, end-to-end solution development, case studies and driving business value through Web 2.0 integration. The session culminates in a keynote address by Elliotte Rusty Harold, who offers his vision and advice on the future of XForms. You can find out the details by going to the conference main page and then clicking the XForms Evening link, or just click here.
2007-10-03: The XForms test-suite has been updated to XForms 3rd Edition.
| Specification | FPWD | LC | CR | PR | Rec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XForms 1.1 | Nov 2004 | Feb 2007 | Nov 2007 | July 2008 | Sep 2008 |
| XForms 1.2 Streamlined for Web Authors (Transitional) |
June 2008 | Dec 2008 | Mar 2009 | Oct 2009 | Dec 2009 |
| XForms 2.0 | Nov 2008 | Sep 2009 | Dec 2009 | Sep 2010 | Nov 2010 |
The Forms Working Group maintains a public mailing list (archive, RSS feed) for public access to Working Group technical discussions as well as logistics such as meeting agendas and minutes.
The general public can join in on the technical discussions using the www-forms-request@w3.org www-forms@w3.org mailing list. An archive and an RSS feed of the list are available.
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Send review comments about Forms Working Group specifications. Additionally, an archive and an RSS feed of the list are available.
Traditional HTML Web forms don'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 following illustrates how a single device-independent XML form definition, called the XForms Model, has the capability to work with a variety of standard or proprietary user interfaces:
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. Other groups, such as the Voice Browser Working Group, may also independently develop user interface components for XForms.
An important concept in XForms is that forms collect data, which is expressed as XML instance data. Among other duties, the XForms Model describes the structure of the instance data. This is important, since like XML, forms represent a structured interchange of data. Workflow, auto-fill, and pre-fill form applications are supported through the use of instance data.
Finally, there needs to be a channel for instance data to flow to and from the XForms Processor. For this, the XForms Submit Protocol defines how XForms send and receive data, including the ability to suspend and resume the completion of a form.
The following illustration summarizes the main aspects of XForms:
Last updated: $Date: 2008/12/12 23:12:28 $
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