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XML Core XMLWhy XForms Matter, Revisited
Author: oreillynet.com |
Published: 20th Mar 2006 |
Visited: 195 times |
Add CommentFiled in: Core XMLA profound change is likely about to shake up your world if you're a web developer, one that I suspect will make the recent efforts in the AJAX space pale in comparison as far as its effect. Very quietly, over the last few weeks, the Mozilla team has been upgrading their XForms capabilities through the use of an XForms extension. It requires that you are running Firefox 1.5.0.1 or above, or Seamonkey 1.0 or above, but frankly, there are very few reasons for you not to be at this stage if you're a Firefox or Seamonkey fan.
More than two years ago, I wrote a piece in my blog with the name "Why XForms Matter" that examined this technology in some detail, but at the time, the level of support for XForms was rather depressingly thin. A standard formalized in 2003, the XForms 1.0 Recommendation offered up an intriguing vision - an XML based format for the deployment of form fields both within XHTML documents and within other XML environments (such as SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics language) that would make it possible to make a surprisingly powerful rich client that didn't have to be extraordinarily heavy in terms of memory footprint, processing power, or speed. What's more, as a W3C standard, it could be deployed with no royalty costs, could be implemented on a wide variety of platforms in implementations that only had to be compliant to the standards, not to any development language, and couldn't be held hostage to a company's need to change their operating environment every time sales figures lagged for the quarter.
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