Sub-forms feature

All,

The XForms WG has an editorial meeting this week and we have been
discussing the proposed XForms 2.0 sub-forms feature with
`show="embed"`.

There are issues with specifying this feature properly, as discussed
in the past, in particular in this thread [1]. In short, sub-forms
raise issues related to isolation, such as visibility of ids, event
propagation, and applicability of CSS styles.

One possibility would be to completely ignore these issues, and just
specify plain inclusions (for which there are clearly valid use
cases). However the working group thinks that this falls a bit short
of a solid "sub-forms" feature.

There is some pretty exciting work going in the HTML world with Web
Components [2], and in particular the Shadow DOM. [3] These efforts
are essentially a continuation of the ideas found in XBL (without the
XML part) and aim at addressing the need for a component model. Taking
care of isolation is a central part of this work.

While we are not discussing the inclusion of a full component model
with the sub-forms feature, trying to address any of the
isolation-related issues of sub-forms would probably end up
overlapping with the Web Components/Shadow DOM work, which we clearly
don't want to do.

So the working group's current proposal is that it is better to defer
this feature to a further version of XForms. Then it could possibly
leverage the Web Components/Shadow DOM efforts.

Thoughts welcome.

-Erik

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xformsusers/2012Jun/0015.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-components-intro-20120522/
[3] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/tip/spec/shadow/index.html

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2012 06:05:53 UTC