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 it used XForms at all. And yet, one participant I conversed with afterwards noted that very little that transpired at the symposium couldn’t have been done ten years ago.
It’s safe to say I have mixed emotions about XForms. One one hand, watching how poorly the browser makers have treated all things XML, I sometimes muse about what it would look like if we started fresh today. If we were starting anew, a namespace-free specification might be a possibility. But with XForms 2.0 around the corner, it’s probably more fruitful to muse about implementations. Even though XSLTForms is awesome, I still want more. :-)
- A stronger JavaScript interface. It needs to be possible to incrementally retrofit an existing page using POHF (plain old HTML forms) toward using XForms in whole or in part. We need an obvious mapping from XForms internals to HTML form controls.
- Better default UI. I still see InfoPath as the leader here. Things designed in that software just look fantastic, even if quickly tossed together.
- Combining the previous two bullets, the UI needs to be more customizable, and easier so. It needs to be utterly straightforward to make XForms parts of pages fit in with non-XForms parts of pages.
- Rich text: despite several assertions during the week, XForms can actually handle mixed text, just not very well. One of the first demo apps (in the DENG engine–remember that?) was an HTML editor. The spec is explicitly designed in such a way as to allow new and exciting forms widgets, and a mixed-content widget would be A Big Deal, if done well.
- Moar debugging tools
During the main conference, Michael Kay demonstrated Saxon-CE, an impressive tour-de-force in routing around the damage that is browser vendors’ attitudes toward XML. And though he didn’t make a big deal of it, it’s now available freely under an open source license. This just might change everything.
Curious about what others think here–I welcome your comments.
-m
