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Unlike the original HTML forms, the creators of XForms have designed XForms to separate control, content, and presentation resulting in a
At the time of this writing no widely used browser (which basically refers to Internet Explorer, Mozilla and perhaps Opera) supports XForms natively, although Mozilla has begun work on an implementation. Despite this, XForms can be used today through various server-side technologies which convert XForms documents to legacy HTML forms on the fly and transparently to users, including the open source Chiba and Orbeon projects. Also plug-in and flash technologies exist which turn browsers into XForms-compliant platforms. The advantage to the open source server technologies is that the resulting output works in theory with almost any browser existing today (the end user won't even necessarily notice that they are viewing an xforms page). The advantage to plugins and flash XForms technology is that these implementations, because they integrate themselves into the browser, can be more responsive, require fewer server fetches, and can present themselves in more exciting ways (ie- controls that don't already exist in the browser, like sliding scales, can be added to a page). The trade off is that each client must install the required software. A good solution might mix both of these solutions, for instance testing the browser for flash and serving a glitzy version for those users, but defaulting to a server solution for other users.
(Note: Although XForms is very promising technology it isn't quite ready for general use as of September 2004. Existing XForms technologies can be made to work but are still quite buggy. This is expected to change quickly).
XForms is inherently tied into XML. Unlike legacy forms which use a non-standard submission protocol (name1=value1&name2=value2), XForms sends all data to the server in XML format. XML documents can also be used to prefill data in the form. Because XML is a standard, many tools exist that can chop and modify data upon submission, unlike the case with legacy forms where in general the data needs to be parsed and manipulated on a case by case manner (although most programming languages eventually obtained library functions that does the parsing, it isn't always simple to find and use these libraries). XForms is itself an XML dialect, and therefore can create and be created from other xml documents using XSLT. Two examples where there is useful are 1). XForms can be automatically created from XML Schemas, and 2). XForms can be converted to legacy XHTML forms: this is basically how server side XForms work today!
XForms, much like XHTML 2.0 which is being developed and in which XForms will be embedded, is completely incompatible with previous versions of XHTML. Because of this there is a learning curve for old time developers, but because XForms in general provides a large time savings for the development of enterprise quality web forms, it still may be an attractive alternative for many companies.
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