RE: XForms, client or server layer

I believe client implmentations will be more comprehensive, robust, and
secure than a server-side delivery of (D)XHTML. In general, the overall
user experience would be best with a client implementation. I think
there will eventually be support in clients. I would like to help on a
Mozilla implementation sometime.

With that said, my entire motivation for investigating and tracking
xforms is to standardize on and reap the formal, collective intellectual
knowledge of xforms in my server-side implementaions. I had written data
validation and binding components that use various methods of describing
their rules. For a new implementation, I decided to use XML to describe
those rules and sought an XML standard instead of rewriting my own.
Thus, I discovered XForms.

I believe it will take a long time (two years?) for robust, compatible
client solutions to appear in any universal form. For one, xforms must
be supported by Internet Explorer either directly or by a popular third
party extension due simply to its popularity. However, that is not a
universal solution, and may not immediately work correctly with IE on a
Mac. Therefore, it must be supported by Mozilla and probably Opera since
they are fairly popular and cross-platform. The situation becomes worse
when you start considering the number of set-top-boxes and other devices
beginning to appear with alternative HTML user agents. (Thankfully, some
of these solutions are using Mozilla/Gecko and Embedded IE.)

Consequently, you should expect to see a number of server-side solutions
for various platforms. These solutions can produce different outputs
depending on the client capabilities. I predict that you will see xforms
implementations appear in specialized clients soon. For example, content
management and collaborative applications could implement XForms in a
non-browser-based client.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Taylor Cowan [mailto:tcowan@silverstream.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 5:09 PM
> To: www-forms@w3.org
> Subject: XForms, client or server layer
> 
> 
> Does anyone mind if I ask a question about XForms?
> 
> Are clients implementing support for XForms, or is it seen as 
> a server side
> layer to convert HTTP form postings back into the XForm spec, and then
> sending a response back based on a transform of an XForm into 
> its HTML form
> representation?
> 
> Unless IE supports it, practicality would lead me to believe 
> it's all about
> some server side software.
> 
> Taylor
> 
>