Working Group Newsletter

The Forms working group had its face to face meeting at Google the week of 
Feb. 9, as well as a virtual face-to-face day on Feb. 5.

Much of the group work recently has been devoted to ironing out 
deficiencies in the substantial test suite for XForms 1.1, an exercise 
that is in parallel with implementers' preparation of their full 
implementation reports for XForms 1.1.  The test suite contains over 400 
tests, and as of Feb. 17 we have 7 tests requiring two more passing 
implementations and 53 tests requiring one more passing implementation 
[1].  Implementers are actively working to complete implementations of 
these few remaining features, after which the working group will be able 
to request advancement of XForms 1.1 to PR.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2009Feb/0049.html

At the end of 2008, the working group published "XForms for HTML".  As 
this this recommendation track document provides attributes and script 
methods intended for use in HTML, including HTML5, it is important to get 
review and feedback from the HTML WG.

The working group has put effort into modularization of XForms, to 
decouple the various components for independent use.  However, the working 
group now feels that the modularization of the markup modules is not the 
right approach to take and instead wants to first consider how the AJAX 
programmer community could benefit from XForms capabilities, then 
determine what APIs do those considerations warrant, and then determine 
what component bundlings of XForms are needed to support those APIs.

Meanwhile, the working group continues to focus further development of 
XForms 1.2 on just those features needed to support XForms for HTML plus 
further incremental refinements that have shown themselves to be needed 
over the years of ongoing XForms 1.1 adoption.

Cheers,
John Boyer
for the W3C Forms Working Group