- From: COUTHURES Alain <alain.couthures@agencexml.com>
- Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:23:05 +0200
- To: Forms WG <public-forms@w3.org>
It was a pleasure to see at XML Prague 2011 that XForms has been recurrently mentioned in presentations and demos. My own paper about JSON for XForms was received by some W3C Group members as in conflict with other works about the future XML Data Model. My argument about this objection was that this is already successfully implemented and supported by any browser due to good support of XML 1.0 and XPath 1.0 without having to wait for browsers vendors to release versions supporting future recommendations. From my point of view, JSON support in MarkLogic Server is less interesting for XForms because it doesn't profit from xsi:type use and because it is using an extra element for arrays which is not good for XPath querying. Non XML names are converted using the _ character for escaping the decimal value (Micah's idea, apparently) of the not supported character; depending on implementations this might be slower or faster than using an extra attribut as we suggested. MarkLogic has developed a new query language for JSON in MarkLogic Server: this language is written in JSON and can be transformed into XQuery for processing. I wasn't personally convinced by this notation and some attendees pointed that it wasn't quite readable for them (JSON was heavily mentioned at the conference but wasn't it because it was a proposed theme for this session of XML Prague?). At the MarkLogic DemoJam, I demonstrated the "file://" support in XSLTForms. I showed the StratML form and, also, a basic XML editor form (just for documents having text contents on leaves elements). Betterform people demonstrated their own extension for embedding forms claiming that forms are becoming far too big if such a functionality is not implemented. They argued that loading times are now acceptable, even for mobile phones. Another guy proposed "nanoforms" because of "XForms being too complex" and I was pleased to see the "...Loading..." dialog box of XSLTForms appearing in yet another demo also based on exist-db. The main preoccupation at XML Prague this year was about XML technologies within browsers: Schema validation (open source alternative to Xopus), XSLT 2.0, XQuery and XMLHttpRequest enhancements. Interactive considerations were indeed studied for XSLT 2.0 (Saxon-ce) and XQuery: HTML event listeners, HTML DOM/properties access from functions or shadow elements. In fact, it was said that "XForms has gone much further than Saxon-ce in declarations of state/input interactions". XSLT 2.0 templates being fired from event listeners is another approach for actions and, comparing to XForms 1.1, XSLT 2.0 has variables and sort capabilities in xsl:for-each. It was said that this is quite similar with XQuery in the browser and a need of coordination has been expressed. People contacted me for training and support for XForms. Some implementors of other technologies told me that they worked sometimes ago with XForms developers but they didn't have the occasion to use it themselves. It sounds like a sort of reborn of XForms for them while new people surely assumed that XForms is a mature technology to be used as others. Michael Sperberg-McQueen has already scheduled a new session for his XForms course (with XSLTForms!) for June in California and flyers about this training were proposed to attendees. -Alain
Received on Tuesday, 29 March 2011 21:22:17 UTC