- From: Erik Bruchez <erik@bruchez.org>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 22:12:02 -0800
- To: Saad Mansour <me.smansour@gmail.com>
- Cc: "public-xformsusers@w3.org" <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
Saad, > We are planning to build a web forms designer that support building of > survey complex forms. We are comparing XFroms and HTML5 Froms. Which is the > best forms format to use that can support the following: I think you are asking a hard question. A few comments: 1. There is HTML forms and XForms as abstract specifications, and then HTML forms and XForms as available implementations. Clearly, by a very long shot, HTML forms implementations are more widespread (any web browser supports them). XForms on the other hand has a small number of implementations. 2. I work on a form runtime and designer (Orbeon Forms / Orbeon Forms Builder, see http://www.orbeon.com/), and we chose, years ago, XForms as underlying the format to represent the forms. This made sense (and still does) because XForms is more rich, declarative, and based on a MVC architecture, and representing data as XML made sense for us. HTML forms have none of this. 3. XForms decidedly works with XML technologies: the markup and data model use XML; bindings, validation, and actions use XPath; there is support for XML Schema datatypes; and I probably forget some! There is support for JSON in XForms 2 though. 4. With XForms need a runtime (or processor, or engine), whether implemented in JavaScript, as a native mobile app, server-side, or as a combination of those, because web browsers and mobile operating systems don't support XForms natively. 5. HTML forms are rarely used plainly nowadays: programmers implement user interfaces with HTML forms but also a large amount of JavaScript, custom widgets, and the help of client-side MVC frameworks (see http://todomvc.com/ for some fun). Something similar is done on the XForms side. Implementations provide extensions, custom UI components, you name it. So it is hard to compare plain, raw XForms vs. plain, raw HTML. There is much more to forms than this in practice. Some answers to your questions: > Web and Mobile data entry. Hard to say. > Design of complex forms. I would say that XForms wins here vs. plain HTML forms. > In case of HTML5, supports reading XFroms. HTML 5 does not support reading XForms. However an XForms processor/engine can translate XForms into HTML forms plus a runtime (JavaScript or other). > Integration with other systems and databases. This is covered neither by HTML forms nor by XForms, except that both support submitting data one way or the other. HTML forms has limited submissions capabilities, XForms has more in this respect (XForms submissions), and is closer to what you can do with JavaScript and XHR. > Less time to develop a web forms designer (not from scratch). Very hard to say. > Web browsers support. No web browser supports XForms natively or probably ever will. But implementations like XSLTForms run on the client, and others as hybrid client/server runtime. > Future support for the technology. > Please, be honest, I feel like XForms is lo longer supported and everybody > is moving to HTML 5 forms. Clearly HTML forms will be here for a long time. XForms's future is much less clear. I don't think people are particularly *moving* to HTML forms: HTML forms have always been in massive use. But it is true that the hopes one might have had of widespread XForms support on the web have dimmed, even as the technologies to implement XForms in web browser using JavaScript, Ajax, web components, and more have become available. -Erik
Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 06:12:49 UTC