Future Goals

From W3C XForms Group Wiki (Public)


[Not sure how current this is. --Erik Bruchez 20:58, 29 August 2011 (UTC)]

Some themes

Theme: Aggregate applications

  • Composed of multiple web pages
  • Possibly involves multiple users working in collaboration to create content
  • Possibly a business process or workflow is driving solution on the server-side
  • Submission and MIP patterns when a model spans pages
  • External, reusable XForms model fragments

Theme: Application of XForms to broader client contexts

  • XForms for documents e.g. ODF
    • Data-driven switch
    • XML signatures integration
  • XForms for HTML
    • Context everywhere, Context on bind
  • A version of XForms as a module for HTMLK, for K>=5
    • Alternate data instance formats (e.g. JSON)
    • Alternate expression languages? (e.g. javascript selectors and expressions, CSS selectors?)
  • Rich Application Web Backplane issues
    • Integration of components and markups on the web client

Theme: Extensibility for authors

  • custom UI components
  • custom xpath functions
  • custom actions
  • custom model item properties
  • custom behaviors through XBL,
  • better DOM interface,
  • JSON submissions
  • ...

Theme: Architectural and Language Advancement

  • generalization of the component technologies
 e.g. schema engine, expression language, XML Events 2
  • generalization of commonly used patterns into higher-order declarative markup
 e.g. repeat patterns, wizard patterns, default trigger, dialog
  • generalization of processing and event lifecycles
 e.g. multiple constraints per node, structural calculates, UI events revisited, consolidated recalculate/revalidate, automatic rebuild detection, etc.
  • incremental refinements of existing features, e.g. more reliable UI events
  • Syntactic simplifications, e.g. MIP-like attributes on UI controls
  • Define abstract model of XForms to enable alternate means of activating functionality and adding to functionality

Older issues

Currency data values, etc. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2008Sep/0041.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2008Sep/0043.html

Validity notification on initial or hidden data http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2008May/0015.html - Isn't it about time we add an xforms-control-initialize event? - Seems we need it for modularization to work right - Defer to face to face meeting

The xforms-link-exception http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2008Aug/0001.html Discussed Aug. 20, 2008. Need to dispatch xforms-link-error to instance rather than link-exception to model. For legacy, if the link-error bubbles up to model, it could throw link-exception, but then the author can prevent the exception by cancelling the error Note: xforms-link-error is not currently cancellable http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2008Aug/0003.html

xforms-submit-done response-body and host language submission result targeting http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2008May/0048.html Discussed 21 May 2008; perhaps only for replace="none" Concern was about efficiency. Could add "want-response-body" default false in xforms-submit, then if turned true the response-body would be non-empty in the xforms-submit-done. Host language could then push response-body content to a new window.

xforms-submit-serialize receives empty submission-body value http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2008Nov/0061.html Discussed 03 Dec 2008; decided to allow future version feature that helps control whether submission body is empty on start Context info of xforms-submit could provide a writable flag