What does "same form" mean?

In the Mission Statement of the Charter for the XForms WG the sentence 
appears,
"The key idea is to separate the user interface and presentation from the 
data model and logic, allowing the same form to be used on a wide variety of 
devices such as voice browsers, handhelds, desktops and even paper."

In addition, in 1.1 of the XForms Requirements WD the following sentence 
appears, 
"The same form will be accessible on a full screen display, as a sheet of 
paper or using a handheld computer resting on your palm."

But what does "same form" actually mean?

The closer I look at the term the more it seems to muddle the separation of 
model and presentation/UI which XForms is supposed to provide.

I guess that a casual reading of that "key" idea led me (and others?) to 
believe I could use one XForms model and then XInclude it (or something 
similar). The (seeming) need to make multiple copies of a model and paste 
them into platform-specific documents is obviously not ideal from a 
maintenance point of view.

I would really like to see a mechanism that specifies how the "same form" - 
by which I mean the same XForms model - can be re-used without copying and 
pasting into separate platform-specific or host-language-specific documents.

Andrew Watt

Received on Monday, 2 September 2002 06:21:38 UTC