A forms-lite straw man

Rising to Mark's challenge, here is a sketch of of a proposal that 
is both syntactic sugar for a subset of XForms and an incremental 
improvement on HTML4. The data model and contraints are implied 
by the annotations provided with the input fields.

Input fields have the following attributes:

   ref:  an XPath expression binding the field to the data
         e.g. ref="details/age"

   type: an enumerated value from a small set as per HTML4
         with the addition of {integer, number, date}

   verify: an XPath expression evaluating to a boolean

   pattern: a regular expression constraining the input value

   min, max and step: numbers acting as constraints with step
     being used for ranges

   required: an XPath expression evaluating to a boolean

   hint, help and alert: corresponding to XForms elements
             (use HTML4 label element for the label text)

Output fields have the following attribute

   value: an XPath expression evaluating to a string

Obviously there are many other details missing from the above,
e.g. initialization and submission, selection controls, repeating 
controls, and autocompletion etc. However, I hope it serves to 
indicate a potential way to blend ideas from both WF2 and XForms.

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>  W3C lead for multimodal interaction
  http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett +44 1225 866240 (or 867351)

Received on Tuesday, 5 September 2006 11:06:29 UTC