XForms is an ideal open standards technology for collecting and submitting data from a wide variety of Web-capable platforms. Using JavaScript to edit the DOM with XForms allows a single form to accommodate multiple, site-unique submission requirements.
XForms is a over complicated and inconsistent standard, and so far no browses have implemented it, and no websites are using it.
Even W3C is starting to admit that XForms will never become popular and something sane like WebForms will be the small steps in the right direction.
Dying? I understand the W3C is starting to recognize the need for something in between the current HTML forms and the new XForms, but I didn’t know they were talking about XForms never becoming popular, where did you hear that?
I have been using XForms with Firefox internally for the last year and found it an ideal tool for getting information from the end-user directly into a seperate XML DOM.
The biggest problem with the web, from my perspective, is that the people in my company still have a very difficult time sharing and publishing information. The web is largly read-only for them. XForms has been the easiest method I have come across for capturing structured end-user data for manipulation, publishing, and storage.
I think this is why you see so much about XForms from IBM. A big part of business is about getting data into computer forms. How do you recreate complex business forms in the browser? HTML forms and javascript and lots of php to front a database? Thats a lot of programming. WebForms…getting better but still the same ballgame. XForms inject your data straight into an XML DOM of choice with basic validation built-in. The few days I spent learning XForms has saved me many more days of programming javascript/php and has greatly reduced my code base.
There are still areas that need to be improved, such as providing something akin to XSLT’s format-number, for financial forms. And I’ll grant you that XForms are overly complicated if all you’re doing is a simple web form, like the one I’m typing in now. Try creating a purchase order form though, and you see XForms start to shine.