Re: XForms Use Case

Edward,

It's not irrelevant because you can use XHTML, it's (most likely)
> irrelevant because the Web platform already has a widely deployed forms
> language: HTML's forms.
>
>
My bed and butter work - first for US National Archives, now (most likely)
for the Library of Congress - is dealing with complex form content with
constraints and dependencies. HTML forms work reasonably well in a lot of
cases, if you're willing to spend a great deal of time and energy writing
Javascript bindings for the various form elements, but once forms get beyond
a certain level of complexity (and it's not very high) such coding can be
very fragile and subject to enormous errors, not all of which are
syntactical.

XForms works well in those environments, in part because you are formally
separating the data model from the presentation from the control
architecture. Combine that with XML data sources (from syndication feeds to
XML Database content), and you can rapidly create very sophisticated
applications that not only maintain data validity but also insures that
complex structures can be created or maintained, something which HTML forms
generally don't do.

I would invite you to take a look at what's actually happening in the XForms
space before blithely dismissing it as irrelevant.

Kurt Cagle
W3C XForms WG