Re: [Xsltforms-support] Is XForms a failure to learn from?

Steve,
I cannot agree with you in some points.


2014-10-17 23:33 GMT+02:00 Stephen Cameron <steve.cameron.62@gmail.com>:
> Does is serve a need?  Mark Lawson and Michael Odling-Smee suggest it still
> does that well for them, however:
>
> (1) Replacing paper forms
>
> Yes, but Adobe PDF forms have been selected as the electronic forms standard
> by the Australian Government, but as I suggested XForms could now compete
> with an offline capability. The two main needs the PDF forms do handle well
> are allowing anyone to design forms and a server side data handling package,
> both of which earn money for Adobe.
>
> Also SaaS is throwing up many online forms services now.

Yes, unfortunately, Adobe PDFs is more popular solution for big forms
but I cannot agree with that they  allow anyone to desing forms. If
you want to prepare simple form of course it's possible. But when you
need complex forms you have to know what you do. For simple one you
can use survey monkey too.

Other minus is that adobe forms are offline and when user download
them on the computer you cannot fix bugs as I do quite often after
release new form.

Plus of PDF form is a print template as default.


>
> (2) Forms can be composed using XSLT
>
> Yes, but so can almost anything really, as Alain has demonstrated with
> XSLTForms (XML translated to Javascript). I'm sure its possible to generate
> AngularJS markup, its declarative too!
>

Of course not. It's not possible nowadays to replace xpath by json
path. Json is just poor brother of xml for simpler situation. I often
read that xml is to big, you need write more code etc. so why html5 is
still like xml? Why the standard wasn't rewriten into json for e.g.? I
think it's possible to write html structure using json notation,
isn't? I cannot imagine how to manage of big json structures. When at
the end I see a lot of closing elements without names! It must be
horrible!

And again AngularJS form is younger brother of xforms. As I compared
some solutions for form building I noticed a set of lacks in
AngularJS. Please tell me how I can use repeat in AngularJS. I can
simply show list of elements, but how AngularJS supprt:
- adding, removing elements?
- adding element based on origin
- adding new element at position
- calculation based on mixed context: inside repeat and external data.

In xforms all I need is good knowladge of xpath.

As I wrote a few days ago I and my coulages prepared more then 2000
diffrent realy big and complex forms using almost pure xforms, xpath
and xsd! (FF 3.6 plugin) with full support of calculation, validation
and user interface.

The only one thing I need to do is a repeat soriting via xslt.


> (3) Declarative validation and business rules.
>
> Michael Odling-Smee does XForms to Schematron rules translation, that is a
> bit strange, why not the other way around? XForms does not understand
> Schematron. Someone has done a PhD on XML Schema to XForms
> translation/integration, where is that project now at commercially?

But xforms have constraint elements and you can write data related
validation as in schematron. Of course you cannot validate instance
data against schematron and only xforms handle validation.

Hiere there is a place for further work and I belive that xforms, xsd,
xml, schematron need a higher level language to imporve them and
paradoxically this language should mix all information in one file.

Jarek

Received on Sunday, 19 October 2014 17:01:42 UTC