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January 24, 2005

XForms XPIs Coming Soon

[play evil empire muzaac]

The work to make XForms XPIs for Gecko 1.8a6+ based browsers is on its way, and with it the first time a XML language can be installed via an XPI. XTF is used to be able to plugin into Mozilla, which was added post 1.7. Not since JavaScript has there been such an revolution!

What is XForms (project page) you ask? For some reason the W3C calls it "the next generation of Web forms", yet what it really is is a standard for storing forms in XML, with data separated from the UI controls. The language has its quirks and bad design choices, but at least it plays nicely with existing standards (DOM 2 Events, XPath). Unlike SVG, which likes to be incompatible with other standards it seems.

The XForms work for Mozilla is also interesting because its truly an open source project - people from IBM, Novell and several community volunteers have contributed to it and continue to work on it together.

Oh yeah, I managed to break the tree several times with XForms-related checkins. Including BSD, ppc/linux and Solaris. I am so proud.

Posted by doron at January 24, 2005 8:21 PM

Comments

Nice, looking forward to testing, I assume the xpi's will also work on Firefox Trunk builds?

Also, where can I find more informatin on XTF and how to use it (examples perhaps?) The link you provide is lacking usefull information.

Thanks!
-Jed

Posted by: Jed at January 24, 2005 9:22 PM

Congratulations!!!!...I think.

Posted by: Jeff Walden at January 24, 2005 10:35 PM

This is incredibly cool. I've heard XTF mentioned before, but I thought it was just some backend Mozilla thing and never really understood the point.

Will WHATWG's Web Forms 2.0 be implemented the same way?

Posted by: Paul Stone at January 25, 2005 5:12 AM

In what ways is SVG's event model incompatible with all other standards?

Posted by: Dean at January 25, 2005 8:15 AM

I too would be curious why you say SVG's event model is incompatible with all other standards? What other standards should it be compatible with?

Posted by: Keir Gordon at January 25, 2005 12:48 PM

The SVG comments were more to do with Adobe's Plugin and the events they expose to JavaScript, which do not follow the spec (event methods are Get* for example).

Posted by: doron [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 25, 2005 1:43 PM

In which case, please make clear when you are commenting on a particular implementation and when you are commenting on the spec.SVG is based on DOM 2 (DOM 3 and XML Events for SVG 1.2).

Posted by: Chris Lilley at January 25, 2005 11:11 PM

I've been waiting ages for a chance to mess with this stuff... :)

Posted by: Ant at January 26, 2005 12:03 PM

It looks a little bit like Cocoons CForms are there any similarities to it ?
But its a nice way to improve working with forms in the web :)
W3C rules!

Posted by: Nacron at January 27, 2005 1:26 AM

Nice work :)

Posted by: Dan Brickley at January 28, 2005 10:53 AM