A silly idea?

I said that I would like to "future proof" my forms by starting to write
them in xforms.
Responses pointed out that xforms is only at working draft 1.0 so any
xforms generated now might require to be revised several times.

This triggered the, probably silly, idea that all XML specifications
(XFROMS, XHTML etc. etc.) should include XSLT stylesheets that would
take a document conforming to that revision of the specification and
spit it straight back out.

This sounds a bit pointless. However such a specification would mean
people instantly had working stylesheets, conforming to the
specification, which they could begin to modify. It would also mean
that, with a bit of cutting and pasting between two specifications,
stylesheets could be generated that would update xforms compliant with
earlier specifications to the latest revision. It might even help with
the generation of stylesheets that translate between say Xforms and
XHTML, if only for UI markup purposes. Having working stylesheets would
be a big boost to people like myself who are trying to quickly get to
grips with several new technologies and it would help standardisation
and long term maintenance.

Is this a silly idea, if so why? - fire away.

Robert

Received on Thursday, 5 September 2002 04:36:28 UTC