December 12, 2007
Welcome to all on the www-forms mailing list.
In March 2007, the Forms Working Group began posting its proceedings publicly, with read access no longer restricted to W3C members. With working group technical discussions taking place on the public-forms list, W3C member postings on the www-forms mailing list have become less frequent.
Accordingly, the Forms Working Group has resolved to publish monthly overviews of its activity for www-forms readers who want to know more, but don't necessarily want to read the high-volume working group mailing list directly.
This message is the first of the series, and is a summary of the highlights of activity of the Forms Working Group for 2007, with a focus on recently published documents and other sources for information.
Beginning in March 2007, the Forms Working Group was chartered with public access to all minutes and documents. Although write access to the mailing list is restricted to working group members, read access is available at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-formsand through RSS at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/feed.rss
We encourage you to check these locations if you want detailed information about the daily process of the Forms Working Group.
For general discussion about Forms, please continue to use this list (www-forms). You can freely join and post to this list.
This list has archives at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/
and RSS feed at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/feed.rss
For official comments under Last Call process on documents, please use the address specified in the document you're commenting on. You do not need to be a member of the list (or the Working Group) to comment on documents. If you're interested in reading last-call comments, a good mailing list to monitor is www-forms-editor, with archive at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/
and RSS feed at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/feed.rss
As errata are discovered in published specifications, W3C process requires us to publish corrected versions of the original recommendation. We published XForms 1.0 TE on October 29, 2007.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xforms-20071029/
The diff-marked version is here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xforms-20071029/index-diff.html
The test suite used is here:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/Test/XForms1.0/Edition3/front_html/XF103edTestSuite.html
For now, the latest version of XForms 1.0 is also reachable at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms
XForms 1.1 has advanced to Candidate Recommendation:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-xforms11-20071129/
CR status is a call for implementation. Many implementations already support a number of XForms 1.1 features, as described in the preliminary implementation report. In the upcoming months, implementers from the working group will be working on their implementation reports. The document will exit CR phase and move to Proposed Recommendation once all features are implemented.
The latest version of the XForms 1.1 series will always be here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/
The XForms 1.1 feature implementation report was also published:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/wiki/Preliminary_XForms_1.1_Implementations
Since implementations of XForms 1.1 are now just beginning, we expect further changes and will be updating this report as vendors report back to us on their experience.
This year W3C also created a wiki for providing information on W3C Forms technologies:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/wiki/
In it you will find pointers to much of the above information, and links to offsite resources as well, such as tutorials and books.
Although not a W3C publication, the recent XForms Evening at XML 2007 was a great success, with a standing-room-only crowd and presentations and demonstrations by XForms processor vendors and application developers and a closing "keynote" address by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
http://2007.xmlconference.org/public/schedule/topic/15
The following resources are valuable for those new to XForms: