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London XForms User Group:XForms and Ajax
XForms and Ajax
Mark Birbeck delivers a seminar on XForms and AJAX. Mark guides the viewers through the architecture behind the classes of some XForm processors and broadly overviews the implications of using this W3C specification for Web 2.0 development.
Mark describes XForms as a generalisation of “patterns” found during AJAX (form) development – implying that CSS, JavaScript and AJAX techniques are metaphorically like the “assembly language” of XForms. He explains the notion of a “pattern” as mark-up which is capable of declaratively expressing a great amount of functionality – for example, capturing an user-triggered event and reacting upon it. The three noticeable patterns of typical AJAX development that XForms encapsulates are the display of tooltip or general messages, submission of data (to a server) and the display or hiding of information in the document.
Using a number of demonstrations, Mark showcases the use of XForms to substitute for the lengthy forms found in many websites today. With a relatively small amount of mark up, Mark implemented AJAX patterns such user-triggers and form-validation via mark-up attributes whilst keeping the code well organised and structured. Although XForms is currently not widely adopted in modern browsers, plug-ins and extensions are available to implement the XForms data processing model meaning that in many cases, JavaScript may not be even be required to put into practice the functionalities that lay in legacy forms. Alternatively, XForms can be generated by server-side platforms (such as Orbeon) and then transformed to legacy XHTML forms before being sent to the browser.
ABOUT MARK BIRBECK
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Mark is managing director of Backplane Ltd. He works on standards and
applications at the juncture of rich user interfaces and the Semantic Web.
More about Mark Birbeck
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ABOUT THE LONDON XFORMS USER GROUP
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