This year’s Balisage conference was preceded by the international symposium on Native XML User Interfaces, which naturally enough centered around XForms. As someone who’s written multiple articles surveying XForms implementations, I have to say that it’s fantastic to finally see one break out of the pack. Nearly every demo I saw in Montreal used XSLTForms if…
Category: XForms
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…
The remarkable C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is offering XForms training in Maryland (at Mulberry Technologies), Feb 14 & 15, 2011. This is a two-day hands-on introduction to XForms. Check it out. This is a great opportunity to learn more about XForms. -m
This epic posting on MVC helped me better understand the pattern, and all the variants that have flowed outward from the original design. One interesting observation is that the earlier designs used Views primarily as output-only, and Controllers primarily as input-only, and as a consequence the Controller was the one true path for getting data…
I asked this on the XSLTForms list, but it’s worth casting a wider net. Say I have an XML instance like this: <root> <format>xml</format> </root> Possible values for the format element are “xml”, “text”, “binary”, or a default setting, indicated by a complete absence of the <format> element. I’d like this to attach to a…
One of the lead bullets describing why XForms is cool always mentions that it is based on a Model View Controller framework. When building a full XRX app, though, MVC might not be the best choice to organize things overall. Why not? Consider a typical XRX app, like MarkLogic Application Builder. (You can download a…
I’ll be speaking next Tuesday (Oct 27) at the Northern Virginia MarkLogic User Group (NOVAMUG). Here’s what I’ll be talking about. Application Builder consists of two main parts: Search API to enable Google-style search string processing, and the actual UI wizard that steps users through building a complete search app. It uses a number of…
XForms 1.1 is now a full W3C Recommendation. Compared to version 1.0, which went live a bit more than 6 years ago, version 1.1 offers lots of road-tested tools that make development easier and more powerful, including new datatypes and XPath functions, a significantly more powerful submission subsystem, and a more flexible event model. And…
Another XForms site launched this week. This one seems pretty close to what I would like XForms Institute to become, if I had an extra 10 hours per week. -m
About a week ago I moved XForms Institute over to Subversion. Now the entire site is under version control, with a local copy I can edit. Publishing is as easy as logging in and running the command ‘svn up’. Honestly, I should have done this long ago. And any future sites I work on will…
Thanks to those who wrote in with bug reports about the XForms Validator: something changed recently and made the inserted Google Ads script confuse browsers, resulting in a blank page where you’d expect results. I’ve turned off the response-page ads, which were only getting in the way, and the problem seems to have vanished. Carry…
XSLTForms, the cross-browser XForms engine (written about previously) that makes ingenious use of built-in XSLT processing, reached an important milestone today, with a beta release. Tons of bug fixes and additional support for CSS and Schema. If you’re thinking about getting involved with XForms and are looking for something small and approachable, give it a…
I’ve heard not a peep about this before, but here it is: XForms for HTML. Let’s read this together. Feel free to drop any comments or observations below. -m
Implementing client-side forms libraries is, and has been, all the rage. I’ve seen Mozquito Factory do amazing things in Netscape 4, Technical Pursuits TIBET on the perpetual verge of release, UGO, and others. In a more recent time scale, Ubiquity XForms impresses me and many others, and it has the right combination of funding and…
I will talk about one or more sessions from XML 2008 here. Mark Birbeck of Web Backplane talking about Ubiquity XForms. Browsers are slow to adopt new standards. Ajax libraries have attempted to work around this. Lots of experimentation which is both good and bad, but at least has legitimzed extensions to browsers. JavaScript is…
I was asked offline for more details about what I have in mind around XiX. Take a simple piece of XML, like this: <root><a>3</a><b>4</b><total/></root>. An XForms Model can be applied, in an out-of-line fashion, to that instance. This is done through a bind element, with XPath to identify the nodes in question, plus other “model…
I’m pondering implementing the computational parts of the XForms Model in XQuery. Doing so in a largely functional environment poses some challenges, though. Has anybody tackled this before? How about in any functional language, including ML, Haskell, Scheme, XSLT, or careful Python? I borrowed the book Purely Functional Data Structures from a friend–this looks to…
I haven’t tried this, but these guys claim to have a solution where The form definitions are saved and exchanged as XForms, and the data as XForm[s] models. The data can be exchanged over http (if the phone users can afford GPRS and have a data connection) or over compressed SMS messages. Sounds like they…
A determined spambot has been submitting the XForms contact form on XForms Institute. OK, so it’s probably more Flash-aware than XForms-aware, but still. -m
I registered ‘xfv’ on Google App Engine. Too bad there doesn’t appear to be any significant XML libraries supported. I have XPath covered by my pure-python WebPath, but what about Relax NG? Anyone know of anything in pure python? -m
I just found out about a nice little XForms engine called Ubiquity. (Having dinner with Mark Birbeck, TV Raman, and Leigh Klotz certainly helps one find out about such things) :-) It’s a JavaScript implementation done right. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Seems like a nice fit with, oh maybe MarkLogic Server? -m
If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element….
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…
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)…
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…
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…
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 “….
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