The intention of this session is to introduce key elements of XForms, give some demonstrations, and above all to generate discussion on the design, use, and implementation of XForms.
Steven Pemberton, W3C/CWI, chair of the W3C Forms working group
What is XForms, and why are so many industries already committing to it so soon? This talk gives a quick introduction, some demonstrations, and explains the advantages of XForms.
Mark Seaborne, Origo Services Ltd
XForms has been a recommendation for 7 months now. So how is it being implemented and used? This talk examines what it is like to be an author and user right now, to see if XForms is beginning to live up to its promise.
T. V. Raman, IBM Research
Interactive forms make up a key component in Web interaction. It is important to raise the level of abstraction at which such forms are authored in order to ensure that Web interaction remains usable and accessible across a variety of end-user devices.
XForms marries a set of well-understood concepts from the world of user interface and software application design with the current set of robust W3C XML standards to create a stable platform for creating Web interaction. It implements the well-understood Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern, and uses W3C XML Schema and XPath for defining and connecting the model to a variety of views. It further defines a set of abstract user interface controls designed for embedding in languages like XHTML that take into account the need for usability, accessibility and device independence. Finally, XForms builds on the universal DOM2 Eventing framework to connect the model and view and provides a well-defined processing model that enables different views e.g., SVG, to bind to the XForms model.
A key consequence of this design is to alleviate the Web author from the minutiae of having to explicitly author user interaction using client-side scripting. But simplifying the notation used to author Web interaction has a far more profound consequence. Just as HTML enabled the creation of global hypertext documents in the early 1990's by providing a simple notation that moved authors beyond having to explicitly program hypertext systems, XForms is poised to enable Web authors to create end-user experiences that are today limited to the more sophisticated Web Programmer. In doing so, it enables the creation of Web interaction that scales across the wide-range of end-user (and end-user device) capabilities, thereby furthering the vision of a universal Web that is ubiquitously accessible to all.
John M. Boyer, PureEdge Solutions
There are many reasons for the growth in volume and value of web-based transactions, including fiscal and logistical benefits as well as compliance with regulations such as the Government Paper Elimination Act (GPEA). To help address the significantly increasing demands being placed on webtechnologies, the W3C has produced the XForms recommendation.
But as the level of sophistication of mainstream web transactions increases, so too does both the necessity and the difficulty of creating auditable and non-repudiable transactions. In this presentation we will discuss the methodologies for solving this problem that are available in the W3C XML signatures recommendation as a means of beginning to address the security of XForms.
Mark Birbeck, x-port.net
XForms is set to create a revolution in the way we build applications. No other programming language brings together XML loading and saving, schema validation, multimodal support, a web deployment model, and extensible function libraries, to name but some of XForms' capabilities. This part of the session will look at how XForms processors are implemented, and use a number of demonstrations to show why XForms processors will provide a solid backbone for the future of applications building.
Date: May 22, 2004
Location: New York, NY USA