Never let anyone say that forms are easy. What seems like a boring, tedious topic on the surface is surprisingly deep and challenging. As evidence, the multi-billion-dollar plan to modernize the US census in 2010 has fallen back to paper technology. Sadly their plans didn’t involve XForms.

Highly-critical applications, like say voting, are even more difficult to get right. Possibly the government will get it in shape be 2020 or 2030. -m

Admittedly, their marketing folks wouldn’t describe it that way, but essentially that’s what was announced today. (documentation in PDF format, closely related to what-used-to-be Konfabulator tech; here’s the interesting part in HTML) The press release talks about reaching “billions” of mobile consumers; even if you don’t put too much emphasis on press releases (you shouldn’t) it’s still talking about serious use of and commitment to XForms technology.

Shameless plug: Isn’t it time to refresh your memory, or even find out for the first time about XForms? There is this excellent book available in printed format from Amazon, as well as online for free under an open content license. If you guys express enough interest, good things might even happen, like a refresh to the content. Let’s make it happen.

From a consumer standpoint, this feels like a welcome play against Android, too. Yahoo! looks like it’s placing a bet on working with more devices while making development easier at the same time. I’ll bet an Android port will be available, at least in beta, before the end of the year.

Disclaimer: I have been out of Yahoo! mobile for several months now, and can’t claim any credit for or inside knowledge of these developments. -m

P. S. Don’t forget the book.

One whole evening of the program was devoted to XForms, focused around the new 1.1 Candidate Recommendation. I admit that some of the early 1.1 drafts gave me pause, but these guys did a good job cleaning up some of the dim corners and adding the right features in the right places. This is worth a careful look. -m

Depending on who’s asking and who’s answering, W3C technologies take 5 to 10 years to get a strong foothold. Well, we’re now in the home stretch for the 5th anniversary of XForms Essentials, which was published in 2003. In past conferences, XForms coverage has been maybe a low-key tutorial, a few day sessions, and hallway conversation. I’m pleased to see it reach new heights this year.

XForms evening is on Monday December 3 at the XML 2007 conference, and runs from 7:30 until 9:00 plus however ERH takes on his keynote. :) The scheduled talks are shorter and punchier, and feature a lot of familiar faces, and a few new ones (at least to me). I’m looking forward to it–see you there! -m

It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “.

The proper way is to look at individual tokens in the attribute value. On first glance, this might require a call to EXSLT or some complex tokenization routine, but there’s a simpler way. I first discovered this on the microformats wiki, and only cleaned up the technique a tiny bit.

The solution involves three XPath 1.0 functions, contains(), concat() to join together string fragments, and normalize-space() to strip off leading and trailing spaces and convert any other sequences of whitespace into a single space.

In english, you

• normalize the class attribute value, then
• concatenate spaces front and back, then
• test whether the resulting string contains your searched-for value with spaces concatenated front and back (e.g. ” vcard “

Or {contains(concat(’ ‘,normalize-space(@class),’ ‘),’ vcard ‘)} A moment’s thought shows that this works well on all the different examples shown above, and is perhaps even less involved than resorting to extension functions that return nodes that require further processing/looping. It would be interesting to compare performance as well…

So next time you need to match class or rel values, give it a shot. Let me know how it works for you, or if you have any further improvements. -m

What are some good tools, with a strong preference for open source, for editing XForms these days? Comment below… -m

Video from XTech, worth a look. -m

In the last couple of days, I’ve had three completely separate instances of people freshly interested in XForms coming to ask me about Stuff.

A declarative model is pretty much irresistible compared to the alternatives. But nobody can directly use an abstract declarative sculpture–sombody needs to put some solid vocabulary and processing meat on the skeleton. And, of course, a good example of that is XForms.

Around the time the book came out, I put together a modest XForms Validator, modeled after the W3C validator of the time. It later went open source, and is available online. But compared to the latest in online validator technology, it feels more than a little dated.

Hypothetically speaking, if I actually had free time, would it make sense to update the XForms Validator? What would you use it for? Would you be willing to help?

Comments below. Thanks, -m

Yeah, it’s for real. You save 27%! Sure, it’s powered by Amazon, but it’s still a little weird to see this come up in search results… -m

ERH’s comments on XForms, as part of his predictions for 2007. Worth a read. -m

An easy to use UBL Editor. Has anyone tried it? -m

Here’s a great new project on Sourceforge: XForms for UBL. In my book, I started in on something like this. Here is a more complete, more up-to-date, fleshed out solution. -m

Last week, I visited Erik Wilde, Bob Glushko, and students up at Cal. No major announcements, just some sharpening of discussion points.

Since this was my first visit to Berkeley, I finally got to tell the joke “thank you for your OS”. Maybe you had to be there.

The intentional web is a formalism for describing “why the font tag is evil”. I often work with 3rd party integration languages, and the markup design is, without exception, crap. I hypothesize that the reason for this is jumping into solution-space before fully understanding problem-space. This seems to apply to lots more than just font tags; I lumped in WML and about half the world’s ajax sites for good measure.

Microformats are a formalism for describing “why creating a new markup language for my CD collection” is evil. Could XForms have been done as a microformat? No, microformats require a strong intentional foundation language, and HTML forms ain’t it. Is the proposed W3C approach an instance of “a deadly two-pronged attack”, a la Yahoo! Photos + Flickr? We’ll see. It does seem like that road leads to a namespace apocalypse, highlighting the fundamental difficulty namespaces hoists on attempts to usably extend HTML and XHTML at the same time. A namespace apocalypse may not be a bad thing.

On namespaces, I went over most of the points from my recent article. I won’t rehash that here.

What are some practical and implementation issues around XForms or the lack thereof? Focusing on mobile, as reason #1 I gave the lack of commercial-grade java browsers, discussed here previously. The state of mobile browsers is appalling, other than Opera and S60. Terms like “model” and “field” are troublesome, because the confuse the problem domain (the real world) and the solution domain (the computer). Browser vendors have been too inwardly-focused, both now and during the first attempt at salvaging HTML forms, leading to a premature jump into solution-space. But perhaps XForms dwelled for too long in the problem space…

Maybe I’ve mellowed some, but increasingly I’m able to look at both sides of issues. A useful skill for Information School students, wouldn’t you agree? -m

This Wednesday, I’m visiting Berkeley to speak with visiting professor Erik Wilde and his School of Information students. It’s an open-ended discussion, but will almost certainly center on XForms, the intentional web, and related information flow technologies. If you’re in Berkeley this Wednesday, drop me a line. -m

Whoops, the feedback email address for the XForms Validator was down after my last round of changes. Fixed. -m

A must-read posting from Mark Birbeck, who knows a few things about XForms and Web Forms 2.0.

He talks about the respective approaches embodied in XForms and Web Forms 2.0, and concludes that the primary difference between them has little to do with simplicity. He goes on to analyze differences in how developers and users view browsers. Go read it, it’s worth it. -m

I’ve written before about the xslt2xforms project by Sébastien Cramatte. The project is not only still alive, but expanded into an entire utility kit including a PHP5 framework and forming “a complete xforms/xml toolbox based only on w3c standards”. Check it out on sourceforge. -m

First off, counting the number of elements isn’t a useful metric for serious discussion  about vocabularies–but it is fun. :)  Eric van der Vlist reports on the latest XHTML and related specs. -m

Yes, the devastating two-pronged attack is in full swing. Link. -m

Word on the street is that some of the new stuff in XForms 1.1 is fantastic. Also on my to-carefully-read list, the mobileOK Scheme. As always, any thoughts welcome here. -m

A reader named Jeff asks:

are you aware of any way to render an XForm as Swing
widgets (or heck, AWT for that matter) from within a Java thick app?

Anyone have pointers? Comment here. -m

It’s no secret that Yahoo! has two different photo sites. And two different social bookmarking sites. Until pretty recently I thought this was craziness. But gradually I’ve realized the power of this approach.

You take a smaller, hipper embodiment of an idea alongside a mainstream site. The resulting double-threat can’t easily be matched be either fresh startups or entrenched players. The smaller site can keep innovating and experimenting away, while the larger site adopts the best ideas and keeps improving without freaking out their base. It’s effective. Car companies have known this for years.

Now, my second realization: The W3C is doing the exact same thing with XHTML 1.x and XHTML 2.x+XForms. -m

Steven Pemberton has done several recent talks on XForms,

XForms tutorial at XTech and WWW

The Power of Declarative Thinking - same slides for the talks at XTech and WWW

I attended at least parts of both of the WWW talks, and I can report that they were well-attended and well-received. -m

By way of Alan Beaufour and Frank Hecker, more great news. -m