FOPad (was: Re: XML History 101)

>   Of course I've looked. I have also read your XForms
> Essentials book in progress and as I said before I
> applaud your effort. However, your lack of real-world
> examples speaks for itself.

Don't worry, everything has been said, I won't add
anything - I just wanted to show something else to you and 
everyone on this list I wanted to show anyways, your post just 
simply gives a good intro for that...:

Attached is a file called "new.fo".
It runs in X-Smiles 0.71

It is an XForms, embedded in XSL-FO, I dubbed "FOPad".

The XForms model says:

  <xforms:submission action="file:/C:/new.fo" /> 
  <xforms:instance id="instance1" src="file:/C:/new.fo"/>

You therefore have to place it under the Drive C root, or
anywhere else and change the two URIs in the Model to that 
location, since it is a self-referencing XForms. 

It is a generic Mini-Word processor, purely declarative, in the 
W3C XForms 1.0 CR and W3C XSL-FO 1.0 standards.

I use it to write invoices, amoung other things. So I can say 
I have made money with this XForms app - of course, it is by 
no means flawless, but it works for me.

What I'm trying to show is that XForms can be so many 
things to so many people, that any example has the problem 
of just showing one possible incarnation of XForms. For
example, what I'm showing now works only in an XSL-FO+XForms 
user agent and is self-referencing, drawing conclusions from 
this example to XForms 1.0 in general would not be 
representative of the overall XForms 1.0 functionality.

JavaScript/ECMAScript hackery (which I used to do myself 
for years in a previous life) tends to result in "one thing" you 
can simply point at, whereas declarative solutions have a much 
wider interpretation space, offering more flexibility, which makes 
it more universal.

All users of any XForms implementation can grab Micah's
Book and understand the underlying concepts, the
"essentials". Having too many specific examples will
mislead readers into certain ways of doing XForms. More 
specific books, over time, will surely address very specific 
XForms usage scenarios, like XHTML+XForms, but not, for
example, XSL-FO+XForms, and then explain things 
example-by-example. But instead of a book for each usage
scenario, or proprietary forms solution, there can be a generic
book that covers the essentials for many uses and solutions.

Talking about languages, english and french, latin comes
to my mind, and latin was indeed actively spoken for a long 
time and is even still teached in school today in some parts of 
the world - for a better understanding of the underlying 
patterns between those languages that eventually grew out of 
latin spoken today. :-)

- Sebastian