Some of the featues in the themes below are CategoryXForms12
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
Further Thoughts on Future Features
Unsorted Future Features List
Context everywhere, context on bind @context everywhere
Data driven switch Model-based switching with switch
case() function (CaseFunction)
Custom XPath functions, e.g sumover(), also from host language e.g. javascript
- Better expression of default trigger
- Better DOM interface to expose all actions and to query states of UI controls
- AJAX programmer APIs (same as above?)
- submissions that put and get binary resources
- setting submission method default to "get"
- Ability to suppress RRRR on submission completion and/or initialization
- Lazy authoring improvement: empty instance exists even if no refs
repeat and relevance/enabled/disabled (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2009Mar/0007.html)
- JSON submissions
- submission to a "new" window
- mediatype="text/html" on textarea for rich text content
- XML Events 2
- Dialogs
- Model improvements (optional, nested, external/src, exceptions)
- UI event notification improvements
- Node "create" action (origin variation on insert?)
- Revisit multiple instance delete issue
- Setting event contextinfo as part of dispatch
- Better upload control (better control of metadata, instant upload submission to server)
- Better support for submission and model patterns for multipage web apps
- Simplified repeat patterns
- Refactor dependencies to detect automatic rebuild conditions and reduce circular dependencies
- Consolidate recalculate and revalidate
- Structural calculates (like declarative insert/delete)
- Same model item property on the same node (e.g. multiple constraints)
- XForms for HTML
See also the XForms 2.0 Features on the future features page, some of which are duplicated here.
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