Today's Web applications require sophisticated control over a form's presentation and over the data that is ultimately submitted. XForms, currently at the level of Candidate Recommendation status at the W3C, aims to satisfy those needs, including separating functionality from presentation and streamlining validation and events processing.

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 response to a recent reader e-mail, I jumped onto the Web to assess the current state of XForms technology, particularly in terms of working implementations. Luckily for me, Micah Dubinko—author of the interesting O'Reilly book XForms Essentials (August 2003, ISBN: 0-596-00369-2)—also just published a story for XML.com entitled "Ten Favorite XForms Engines" that helped to make my job quick, easy, and pleasant.

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.

If XDocs--excuse me, Infopath--is about forms, why didn't they call it XForms? Because the name was taken by something that they've chosen to extend without even embracing. It's time that XForms showed up on more radar screens. MS people consistently hem and haw about InfoPath's relationship to XForms; I'd love to see what Paoli had to say to you about it.

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).

Nearly 10 years after the introduction of HTML forms revolutionized transactions on the Internet, a new specification is set to reshape the nature of Web-based forms.

Traditional HTML forms violate many of the tenets of good markup language design, frequently mixing presentation and data. In this article, Joel Rivera and Len Taing introduce you to XForms, an extension of XHTML that represents the next generation of Web forms. Though XForms is still in an embryonic state, it holds great promise: For instance, a form written with XForms can be written once and displayed in optimal ways on several different platforms. This article will give you a head start on this important emerging XML technology.

If you've read my previous columns, it should be clear that SVG provides what programmers and designers need to create interactive 2D graphics. What makes SVG a little special is the versatility it inherits from XML. XML vocabularies are meant to be extended and intermixed with one another. But despite some noteworthy efforts to create XML-aware browsers, like XSmiles, Amaya, and Mozilla, rock-solid SVG-centric browser applications are not quite ready. But it may be possible to start implementing XForms UI controls in SVG.

Today, XML is most definitely in the mainstream, and proving its mettle by making all kinds of new and unique applications possible (witness the success of Amazon.com's AWS service, or the Google APIs, both based on XML technology). This article provides an introduction to XForms, a recent W3C Recommendation that suggests using XML to manage the display, input and processing of form data on the Web.

A form -- whether a sheet of paper or a web page -- represents a structured exchange of data. Web services, as typified by emerging standards like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, is an excellent approach to exchanging data in a structured way, although usually the exchange is between machines. Since computers are much better at, well, computing, web services is an important and overdue development in the evolution of the Web. Nevertheless, web services applications exchanging information only between machines isn't very interesting: lots of electronically accessible information originates with ordinary human beings.

This month Microsoft is releasing Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, putting an end to speculation about what the software giant's approach to XML data collection would be. InfoPath appears on the surface to be similar in functionality to several of the XForms engines I wrote about earlier. Although the official Microsoft FAQ no longer even mentions XForms as of this writing, InfoPath is frequently compared and contrasted with XForms.