This document is being put together by the members of the W3C XForms Working Group as a repository of Frequently Asked Questions about XForms 1.0.
Please send suggestions or comments about this FAQ to www-forms@w3.org (archives), including the word FAQ in the subject line.
Here are the primary benefits:
XForms can do everything that HTML Forms can do, and then some. In particular XForms lets you:
No. The XForms Recommendation may make it look complicated, but it is not a tutorial on XForms; it is addressed to implementors who need to know exact details about how to implement XForms, and so is very detailed.
The same form written in HTML Forms and XForms looks pretty much the same. It is when you start to design forms that HTML wasn't designed to handle that XForms starts to become much simpler. So XForms contains things that HTML Forms doesn't, but that is in order to make forms creation simpler. See XForms for HTML Authors for examples.
No. There are already several implementations that let you use XForms with existing browsers, either with plugins or by transforming the forms at the server, as well as a number of browsers that implement XForms natively.
There is a list of XForms Implementations that contains details of many of these implementations; an editorial review including screen shots of some of them, can be found at xml.com.
At the time of writing XForms has been demonstrated on PDAs and mobile phones using proxies, using the same techniques that are often used to present web content on smaller devices. We anticipate that native XForms clients will appear on mobile devices soon.
All of them! XForms has several new submission methods compared with HTML Forms, but these are all standard HTTP methods for sending data over the network. XForms can use 'PUT' to put data to a server, can talk to a SOAP or XML RPC server, but also supports legacy formats allowing forms to work with all existing forms servers.
The XForms working group that created XForms contains representatives from many major computing companies, see the press-release and testimonials about XForms for details. On top of this there are a large number of implementations emerging. In fact XForms is the most-implemented W3C specification ever at this stage in its life-cycle.
Some large user populations are beginning to emerge, including the British Government's e-government initiative, one country's tax service, and a country's insurance industry.
That's right. Forms were the basis of the e-commerce revolution and they are still a hot topic! However, the many companies backing XForms believe that there are advantages in using a non-proprietary technology that is based on common standards, and not tied to a single vendor. It means a wealth of user agents on a variety of platforms. Furthermore, we believe that once you have appreciated the advantages of the XForms approach -- authoring once for multiple platforms, integration in XML, ability to 'edit' external XML documents -- you will want no other!
The XForms home page is a good source of information about XForms.
There are books about XForms appearing, and a search for "XForms" at any well known online bookstore will reveal them.
There is an introduction to XForms for HTML Authors.