The Forms Working Group

The Forms Working Group
Public Mail Lists/Archives
Implementations
Documents
Test Suite
Validator
FAQ
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Schedule of Deliverables
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Activity Statement
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Participants
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Issue Tracking
The Fo
rms Working
Group
The Forms Working Group was officially closed on
2015-04-08
Technical work may continue at the W3C
XForms
Users Community Group
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.
Joining
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.
News
2013-03-12: Orbeon Forms 4.0 Released
. Featuring several
XForms 2.0 features.
Blog
post
Release
notes
2012-08-07:
Public working draft of
XForms 2.0
. The live
version of the spec is
on the wiki
2011-04-26: Tutorial - An Introduction to XForms for Digital
Humanists
. At the Digital Humanities 2001 Conference at Stanford, Palo
Alto, California, there will be a half-day introductory tutorial on XForms for
the Humanities.
More...
2011-04-09: Introduction to XForms course
: Black Mesa
Technologies is pleased to announce a two-day hands-on introductory course on
XForms to take place 16-17 June 2011 in San Carlos, California.
More...
2011-02-01: betterForm 'limegreen'
: Betterform has a
forthcoming release of their XForms system, codenamed
limegreen.
In a
blog post they have given information about what is coming in the new version.
More...
2011-01-19: IBM Forms 4.0
. The
IBM Forms
team has
announced a major release of its XForms-powered software suite.
More...
2010-07-26: New XForms 1.1 Implementation.
Seneca
is currently implementing XForms 1.1 in
the next release of
Smartsite
iXperion
and Smartsite Content Management Server, the leading Dutch Web
CMS. The Smartsite iXperion XForms implementation is written as a multi-tiered
application in C# (.NET) and can be hosted on any .NET based system. XHTML +
jQuery/AJAX rendering is included as a pluggable render device in the XForms
architecture. Other render devices can easily be plugged in. The XHTML output
will be accessible, WCAG and “Web Guidelines” compliant and built using
“Progressive Enhancement” techniques. Smartsite iXperion XForms thus
downgrade well, even in non-scripting environments, but will still have a
slick, state-of-the-art look and feel in modern browsers.
More...
2010-06-30
Xfolite
. Xfolite is a
light-weight XForms client for the J2ME platform. It was originally created at
Nokia Research Center, and it includes a DOM and XPath 1.0 implementation as
well as an XForms engine that implements the XForms 1.1 specification almost
completely. XML Schemas and CSS are outside project scope, however. Xfolite is
open source and licensed under the LGPL license.
More...
2010-06-16
betterForm XRX Edition
. The
betterFORM project
has released a new
version (3.1) of its XForms-based toolkit, with a focus on the combination of
eXistDB with betterFORM to provide a complete platform for developing XRX
(XForms REST XQuery) applications that use XML technologies from front to back.
A graphical installer makes it easy to quickly get started.
More...
2010-06-07
Orbeon Forms updated
. The
server-side implementation of XForms,
Orbeon Forms 3.8
is now
available, with
over
350 improvements
since the previous release, including a new
Professional Edition
. Orbeon
Forms is an open source forms solution which includes an XForms implementation,
the
Form Runner
runtime, and the
Form
Builder
form designer.
2010-05-17
Forms Working Group
rechartered
. Today the W3C announced that the Forms Working Group has
been rechartered for two years.
The new
charter
includes work on XForms 1.2, XForms 2.0, XML Events 2.0, XForms for
HTML, as well as maintenance of XForms 1.1. To join the working group, please
see the link above, under "Joining".
2010-03-19
New XForms Implementation
. The
betterFORM project
released Version 3.0
codenamed 'lightSteelBlue' to the public. It combines a full XForms 1.1
implementation with the Dojo toolkit for enterprise-level solutions. betterFORM
allows easy creation of highly dynamic Web 2.0 user interfaces with attractive
controls and layout. You can add validations, calculations, actions and events
to build complete web applications in a declarative way.
2010-02-02
Swiftfox browser for Linux comes with
XForms pre-installed
Swiftfox
is a free Firefox-based browser for Linux that is a good alternative for
Firefox for Linux. It contains a set of software builds of Mozilla Firefox and
is written to maximize efficiency on Intel and AMD microprocessors. Swiftfox
can be downloaded in open source code and proprietary binaries. Add-ons for
Mozilla Firefox are compliant with Swiftfox.
The XForms extension is preinstalled and enabled.
More...
2010-01-27
emagiC CMS.Net
is a milestone
in web content management, both for web developers and for web masters. Thanks
to the advanced logic of the administration interface, the system makes it easy
to input, publish and manage information on a website. The combination of
content management and site management also offers a high degree of
flexibility.
The XForms application based on the new W3C XForms standard is the flagship
of the modules. It manages structured content such as product catalogues, news
items, press releases, jobs.
Over 250 medium and large companies and organisations in Belgium and the
Netherlands alone have already made the right choice by opting for emagiC CMS.
They are active in a variety of sectors: government, industry, distribution,
healthcare, European institutions, ICT, banking and insurance, car industry,
telecommunications, transport, fashion, chemistry, media, financial and
marketing services, real estate, tourism, non-profit and many more.
More...
2009-12-21
eXist now directly supports
XForms
eXist
now directly
supports XForms via Alain Couthures' excellent XSLTForms processor. XSLTForms
implements the XForms standard within the browser and is thus easy to
integrate. However, eXist will also work with other XForms processors like
Orbeon or Chiba.
More...
2009-10-20
: The Forms Working group is
pleased to inform you of the
W3C announcement
that
XForms 1.1
is now a
W3C Recommendation. XForms 1.1 substantially upgrades the XML data processing
platform introduced by XForms 1.0 by adding web service, REST service and other
connectivity capabilities, conditional and iterative event action handlers,
user interface improvements, and many other refinements. See also the
testimonials
2009-10-05
: EPiServer CMS is a fast, flexible and robust
Web Content Management system that is used by thousands of organizations and
companies around the world for managing their Web sites and intranets.
It
supports XForms natively
2009-10-02
: The
EMC Documentum XForms Engine
(codenamed Formula) is a pure client-side XForms implementation that runs
entirely from within a web browser. It is capable of rendering very flexible
and dynamic forms without the need for a plugin or processing outside of the
browser. EMC provides the EMC Documentum XForms Engine free of charge for
development purposes. Formula has been built using Google Web Toolkit.
Online demo
2009-08-18
: The Forms Working group has
completed the candidate recommendation implementation phase for
XForms 1.1
, and it
is now been published as a W3C Proposed Recommendation. W3C member companies
now have until September 22 to comment and vote on advancing the specification
to a W3C Recommendation.
2009-06-04
: The W3C Forms Working Group
resolved
today to
request advancement of the
working
group's latest version of XForms 1.1
to
W3C
Proposed Recommendation
based on sufficient interoperable implementation
experience as defined in the exit criteria of the
XForms 1.1 Candidate
Recommendation
2009-06-03
Orbeon Forms 3.7.1
is now
avaiable. It includes over
400 improvements
since version 3.6, including enhanced XForms 1.1 support, reusable user
interface controls based on
XBL 2
, and
a new preview of Orbeon Form Builder (Orbeon's web browser based visual form
designer).
2009-05-31
: The XForms 1.1 implementation
reports for the
Ubiquity XForms
Firefox processor
and the
Ubiquity XForms
Internet Explorer processor
are now available.
Ubiquity XForms
provides a
client-side Ajax/Javascript implementation of XForms 1.1.
2009-03-04
: The
XForms 1.1 implementation
report for the Chiba XForms processor
and
XForms 1.1
implementation report for XSLTForms
are now available.
Chiba
and
XSLTForms
are both
implementations that can be used client- and/or server-side.
2009-01-26
: EMC Documentum has provided an
XForms 1.1
implementation report for their EMC Formula processor
, a javascript
implementation tested under FireFox and IE6+. There also now available a
focused
implementation report for the Chiba XForms processor
2008-12-19
: The First Public Working Draft
(FPWD) of
XForms for
HTML
has been published. This is an important milestone as it signifies W3C
Director approval to enter the technical report into the W3C Recommendation
track. The intent of this specification is to provide greater alignment of
XForms into web pages (both HTML and XHTML). A combination of attribute
decoration and script methods simplifies the web author experience of getting
started with XForms. The script methods and the semantics of the attributes are
mapped onto the rich XForms model-view-controller-connector architecture,
providing authors with a smoother, selective migration path to the more
elaborated behaviors available from the full element markup available in
modules of XForms.
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
announcement
for further 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
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.
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
Links
Face to face
meetings
News from the W3C
Forms Working Group
XForms
news coverage
(Google)
Implementations
of XForms
The W3C Forms Working
Group Wiki
The
mail
archive
of the Forms Joint Task Force formed with the
W3C HTML Working Group
Upcoming
talks on XHTML and XForms
Publications
Editor's Drafts
XForms 1.2 Features
working group
drafts
XHTML + XForms 1.1
Draft Schema
in Zip File
XForms 1.1
XForms 1.1
Recommendation
XForms 1.1
Schema
XForms 1.1
Proposed Recommendation
XForms 1.1
Candidate Recommendation
XForms
1.1 Test Suite
Zip
file
XForms 1.1 Requirements
(W3C Working Group Note)
XForms 1.0
XForms
1.0 (Third Edition) Recommendation
Test
Suite
XForms 1.0
Basic Profile
, now a W3C Candidate Recommendation.
Implementation
Report
XForms 1.0
(Second Edition) Recommendation
(Now superceded)
XForms 1.0
Recommendation
(Now superceded)
Testimonials for
W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation
Implementation report
XForms 1.0 Requirements
(04 April
2001).
Supporting Documents
XForms 1.0 Frequently Asked
Questions
Tutorial -
XForms for HTML
Authors: Part 1
and
XForms for HTML Authors: Part 2
XForms Quick Reference
XHTML to XForms Converter
(in
XSLT)
Schedule of Deliverables
Schedule of Deliverables
Specification
FPWD
LC
CR
PR
Rec
XForms 1.1
Nov 2004
Feb 2007
Nov 2007
August
2009
October
2009
XForms for HTML
(1.2 Transitional)
Dec
2008
Jun 2010
Oct 2010
May 2011
Jun 2011
XForms 1.2
Dec 2009
Jun 2010
Oct 2010
May 2011
Jun 2011
XForms 2.0
Nov 2010
Nov 2011
Sep 2011
Sep 2012
Nov 2012
The Forms Working Group Mailing
Lists
public-forms@w3.org
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.
www-forms@w3.org
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.
Subscribe/Unsubscribe
Send an email to
www-forms-request@w3.org
with the word
in the email subject header. (To unsubscribe,
send email to the same address with the word
unsubscribe
in the email
subject header.) .
For additional help, consult the
W3C's public email
list pages
www-forms-editor@w3.org
Send review comments about Forms Working Group specifications. Additionally,
an
archive
and an
RSS
feed
of the list are available.
What Are XForms?
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:
Key Goals of XForms
Support for structured form data
Advanced forms logic without server round-tripping
Dynamic access to server data sources during form execution
Decoupled data, logic and presentation
Seamless integration with other XML tag sets
Richer user interface to meet the needs of business, consumer and device
control applications
Support for handheld, television, and desktop browsers, plus printers and
scanners
Improved internationalization and accessibility
Multiple forms per page, and pages per form
Suspend and Resume capabilities
Getting Help
XForms 1.0 Frequently Asked Questions
is available
XForms for HTML
Authors
An introduction to XForms for people who know
HTML Forms.
XForms Quick Reference
XForms & Cause-and-Effect
Programming
A brief introduction to XForms concepts
and markup via a sample form.
An interactive tutorial for W3C
XForms
. The site not only describes how XForms works, but also includes
interactive exercises written in XForms.
For a perspective on how XForms is enabling increasingly sophisticated
web applications that arise in financial/banking, insurance, health care,
and enterprise information management, see the papers
XFDL
+ XForms
and
XSL-FO
+ XForms
For a perspective on XML signatures and XForms, please see
Applying
XML Signatures to XForms-based Documents
in the XML 2006 conference
proceedings.
Kurt Cagle's Six Part Series on
Understanding XForms:
Why
XForms Matter, Revisited
The
Model
Components
Customization
Events
and Actions
, and
AJAX,
XBL and XForms.org
XForms.Org
XForms on Wikipedia
Steven Pemberton, Co-chair, Team contact, W3C/CWI,
steven@w3.org
Leigh Klotz, Co-chair, Xerox
W3C
MIT
ERCIM
Keio
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