XForms

XForms is a W3C standard for electronic forms for data collection, that is, interactive questionnaires, in particular the World Wide Web. XForms is platform independent and can operate a variety of devices, from computers and mobile phones to interactive television.

XForms was designed to replace the support for forms in HTML or XML -based successor to XHTML and connect with the rest of the XML technology. XForms is not tied to XHTML. XForms would have been part of the XHTML 2.0 standard, whose development was discontinued.

Standardization

XForms 1.0 became a W3C standard in October 2003. In October 2007, appeared with XForms 1.0 ( Third Edition ) is a corrected version of the standard. Since November 2004 there is a " working draft " for XForms 1.1, which was updated in November 2007 for the last time and a recommendation is made ​​on 20 October 2009.

Operation

XForms adheres to the MVC architectural pattern. Thus, the model is described separately as XML before the presentation and control information is given.

The representation is described very loosely and depends largely on the implementation and the description language, were embedded in the XForms. The elements of the model are associated with different widget types, further information on the display ( for example, scaled, etc.), contain important and XML Schema data types. Especially the latter is important because the implementation, the user can directly provide information about the data to be entered without the need to validate the data before consuming. This saves in Web applications as the use of JavaScript. Especially for smaller devices like mobile phones, this function is important since many resources can be saved.

However, this does not save the validation of the data on the server before they are further processed. Indeed, it is possible to ignore the validation information in the XForms and einzuspielen any data in the data channel.

Support

Currently supports only the hardly used Java Web X -Smiles specification. For the diffuse large Browser program parts must be installed: To exist Mozilla XForms extension for Mozilla Firefox and the plugin form player for Internet Explorer. Mozilla XForms is no longer being developed since 2010 and is no longer supported since the browser version 19. There are some JavaScript solutions that transform client-side XForms into HTML or XHTML and some applications, such as Chiba, better shape or Orbeon that do this on the server side.

Another implementation of XForms provides Mozquito DENG. OpenOffice.org supports and uses version 2.0 also XForms. The XHTML to XForms Converter provides Web authors an easy way to transform their web forms using XSLT into valid XForms documents.

Can better shape by means of the free frameworks XForms forms already are converted on the server side in HTML, enhanced by JavaScript and AJAX.

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