The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tuesday announced XForms 1.0 as an official recommendation, paving the way for a new way to present information via the Web as an improvement over Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

In the early '90s, the concept of data capture forms was added to the HTML language specification. HTML forms enable Web developers to create Web pages that solicit and capture information via the Web browser.

The lack of separation of concerns that arises when incorporating presentational markup within executable CGI scripts is typically overcome by developing Web applications using more sophisticated server-side technologies such as Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP),6 Java Server Pages (JSP)7 or Active Server Pages (ASP).

For example, one user may want to store an XForms model in a separate file, while another may want to store forms in a database.

HTML has always been the predominant data format of the Web, and it has influenced the design of nearly every XML vocabulary ever written. So it's a little disappointing to see the languid adoption of XHTML, which takes HTML from its SGML heritage into the world of XML.

XForms element <model> holds the instance data along with its associated type constraints. Constraints on XML instance data can be static type constraints as expressed via XML Schema; static constraints are suitable for capturing aspects of the data that are not likely to change during user interaction.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tuesday announced XForms 1.0 as an official recommendation, paving the way for a new way to present information via the Web as an improvement over Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

It's a funny old thing. One man's meat is another man's poison, or as we would prefer to say here at HoT, One non-gender-specific employee's Quorn and Lentil mash is another non-gender-specific employee's anti-nutritional comestible. We would prefer to say that, but rarely have the time, because we are too busy taking the "sting" out of XML.

An introduction to authoring XForms 1.0 documents.

Get XForms specification information and sample code here.

The finalization of the XForms 1.0 recommendations finally came 11 days ago. There has been very little written about this, except for mentions that it was indeed, completed.

We learn to write an application with XForms by simulating a game with 2 players and 2 actions.

A common task for programmers and web developers alike is the need to navigate through some organised set of data. A useful XForms form, then, would be one that achieves this in some non-specific way.

Currently some mobile phones come equipped with digital cameras and color displays for sharing images. This mobile phone/display/camera device and its use model is a special case that can be generalized.

In the first part of this series, I gave you a quick introduction to the newly-released XForms 1.0 specification, by explaining the fundamental concepts of the XForms model. Now that you know the basics, find out how to submit XForms data to a server-side script or save it to a local client file, and also read about how XForms can integrate with XML Schemas to simplify input validation.

A complete list of XForms implementations is maintained by the XForms WG. This section covers some of the major implementations at the time of writing to get readers started on XForms.

This document describes development techniques for use in conjunction with the XForms package for Webware. After having read this document, you should be able to deploy applications within Webware which make use of a variant of XForms definitions. Such definitions attempt to strictly define the "data types" in use in particular Web interactions or transactions, whilst providing support for hierarchical data structures, and this framework seeks to simplify the task of supporting the manipulation of such structures within applications.

XForms is more than just a replacement for HTML forms, it can be used to develop forms in Outlook too.

At the same time of the Eclipse announcement, Novell announced also announced the availability of Novell exteNd 5, an innovative set of service-oriented integration and portal technologies. Much of the innovation of this release has gone into the creation of a completely new, standards-based and data-binding set of frontend technologies based on Xforms and JSR 168 portlets.

Want to write graphical programs for Linux, but don't have time to learn X programming? Read this introduction to and review of XForms, a graphical user interface toolkit for X.