Re: Will Internet Explorer support XForms

Thanks for your replies, the mist is starting to clear.

I was aware that style sheets could control fonts and backgrounds, but not
as Mark as pointed out, they could define controls. How far does this go? My
concern is looking at examples, especially with plug-ins, that things like
sliders and shapes of say radio buttons were under the control of the
plug-in. But if what you are saying is that they can be controlled by a
style sheet this resolves one issue. Is this anywhere I could read up on
more specially defining look and feel of form controls?

A follow up question on this theme is that sometimes the layout matters too.
For example we are working with an insurance company who want to offer their
products to intermediaries. They want to allow their forms to be embedded
into the intermediaries site. This would mean that the intermediary would
have control of the look and feel of the outside (headers, footers, general
nav bar, sideboard ads...) and the insurer would slot their form into a
"slot" (table cell) defined by the intermediary.

We have done this is a simple (and maybe clunky way) i.e. in the table cell
called a script to load the form into that table cell. This achieves what
they want, does XForms support this ?

Thanks for your help so far, hopefully won't take too much more of your
time.

kind regards.............Dharmesh

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Birbeck" <Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net>
To: "'Dharmesh Mistry'" <dharmesh@edgeipk.com>
Cc: <www-forms@w3.org>; <XForms@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 7:12 PM
Subject: RE: Will Internet Explorer support XForms



Dharmesh,

> Please forgive my ignorance I am relatively new to this forum and
> technology.

They're good questions!

> Whilst I agree that FormsPlayer and other software companies can address
issues
> around the browser support, how does this affect a standard look and feel
from
> a marketing perspective?
>
> For example say I create a Insurance form for Brand X, using their logo's
etc.
> Normally we would have strict guidleines about fonts and other look and
feel
> aspects. However from what I understand the forms players decide what a
text
> control, listbox, slider or button looks like? Or can I ensure whichever
player
> our customers use, the form will look exactly the same and thus maintain
brand
> integrity ? If not do we have to test on every forms players to review
look and
> feel?

Most of what you describe falls into the domain of CSS - which means it will
hopefully become increasingly more controllable as CSS evolves. A lot of
good work has gone into CSS 3 for this type of thing. For example, there is
now a pseudo-element called ::value that allows the 'data entry' part of a
control to be styled separately from the rest of the control. This means
that in this situation:

    <xforms:input>
      <xforms:label>Name</xforms:label>
    </xforms:input>

you could use CSS like this:

    xforms|input
    {
      background-color: yellow;
    }
    xforms|input > xforms|label
    {
      background-color: blue;
      width: 100px;
    }
    xforms|input::value
    {
      background-color: white;
      width: 200px;
      border: 1px black solid;
    }

to style the different parts of the control to suit your organisation and
application.

Of course, an input control is quite simple, but it does seem logical that
other common parts of controls will become established as pseudo-elements.
For example, CSS 3 has '::choices' to represent the part of selection
controls that contains the various options to choose from, and selections
could be styled as lists.

Regards,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
x-port.net Ltd.

Received on Tuesday, 14 October 2003 04:09:44 UTC