Steven Pemberton
W3C and CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
CWI
Kruislaan 413
P.O. Box 94079
1090 GB Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl
Tel: +31 624 671 668
http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/
HTML Forms were the basis of the e-commerce revolution, and have become the mainstay for interaction and data submission over the web. Now after a decade of use, they are being replaced by XForms, the new technology for doing forms on the Web.
XForms offer large benefits over traditional HTML Forms, such as an improved user experience by allowing more to be checked in the browser, easier authoring, device independence, and improved accessibility, as well as allowing editing and submission of XML data.
XForms was the most implemented W3C technology on its day of release ever when it was announced; it is supported by many major computer companies, such as IBM, Novell, Oracle and Sun, and several industries have announced that they are moving to XForms. There are implementations that run on desktops, PDAs and mobile phones, as well as voice browsers.
This tutorial introduces XForms and demonstrates use cases and applications of the technology.
All of XForms will be described, along with examples and demonstrations of several use cases. One of the themes will be that it need not be a choice between mobile or non-mobile applications, but that both can be provided with a single technology.
The tutorial is for people who want to learn about new developments in Web technology, and how to apply them to increase the usability, accessibility and device-independence of websites and services.
Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, Amsterdam, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. He has been involved with the Web from the beginning, organising two workshops at the first WWW conference in 1994, and chairing the first Style Sheets Workshop in 1995. He is chair of the HTML and Forms Working Groups at the World Wide Web Consortium W3C, and co-author of amongst others HTML, CSS, XHTML and XForms. He has given tutorials on Web technologies many times before. He was until recently editor-in-chief of ACM/interactions.