Brian Ryner (bryner) brings us the news that he and the Mozilla XForms team "released a beta version of the XForms plugin for Firefox and Seamonkey" Yours truely spoke with Mr. Ryner at length about this release and here's some of what he had to say.
ad So, tell us about this beta release.
br Everyone put in long hours -- that would be Darin, Doron, Aaron, Allan and Olli; we're exhausted but we're pleased to have achieved this milestone.
ad After people install this plug-in, how is their browsing experience changed?
br It's probably not. This release is really something that will be mostly appreciated by forward looking web developers. That's the audience we're looking for with this beta.
ad When can we expect the next release? Will it be a final release? Will it be bundled with any of the Mozilla applications?
br The next release isn't scheduled yet but we'll most likely have at least one more non-final release. At this point, it doesn't look like we'll be seeing XForms bundled with the upcoming Mozilla product releases. However, we will be working to have installable plug-ins that are compatible with the major releases.
ad Thanks for taking some time out of your busy schedule. I'm sure that our readers appreciate that.
br No problem. Think this'll make slashdot ;-)
Posted by asa at February 2, 2005 02:50 PMI guess Darin should be working on gForms at the big G then ;-).
Asa, question for bryner,dbaron. Will this implementation of XForms help in Web Forms 2.0 or does that require other core infrastructure to happen first (such as moving GFX to Cairo, dbaron's reflow refactor and other things)
Posted by: Yusuf on February 2, 2005 06:23 PMYusuf, XForms is pretty unrelated code-wise to webforms 2.0. I don't think there's any real value for one from the other.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on February 2, 2005 07:30 PMAs a lowly web developer that has no idea what exactly this stuff can do I would love to see a screenshot of some XForms widgets. And if I install the extension, it would be cool if there were were a demo site ... just to get the creative juices flowing.
Posted by: miguel on February 2, 2005 07:33 PMLooking for some more information about XForms, I found this on Wikipedia:
XForms is an XML format for the specification of user interfaces, specifically web forms. XForms was designed to be the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner to describe any user interface, and even perform simple and common data manipulation tasks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XForms
If XForms is used to specify user interfaces in XML, then what is its relationship to XUL? It sounds like there would be a fair amount of overlap.
Posted by: Kevin on February 2, 2005 07:50 PMKevin, if you ever code with XUL, you'll not probably ask that question... XForms and XUL have different set of widgets. Scripting (JavaScript) is NOT required in XForms, but needed in XUL. You can specify to type of control in XUL (e.g. checkbox? selection box?), but probably not in XForms (the presentation of XForms depends on the user agent).
Posted by: minghong on February 2, 2005 09:07 PMso where can we get the plugin then?
Posted by: squegole on February 3, 2005 02:24 AMOn the project homepage. Isn't that obvious? ;-)
Posted by: minghong on February 3, 2005 02:45 AMFYI, if you scroll to the end of the project page, you should see a weird black dot. View source. You'll find a weird little image of width 1px and height 1px. It is actually a hit counter! It seems there was already 4152 hits... :-)
Posted by: minghong on February 3, 2005 02:49 AM