XForms is coming of age with version 1.1

A new draft of XForms 1.1 was made available last week. It's a last call working draft, which means that once comments made on the document have been taken into account, it will hopefully be possible to advance the specification through candidate recommendation, and on to a full recommendation.

To be brutally honest, in terms of features, XForms 1.1 is nothing to write home about. The bulk of the new stuff was needed long ago, and we could have done with having it in there before now: looping and conditional constructs are crucial to any language; the ability to set URLs and headers at run-time is a 'must-have' when using SOAP, WebDAV, ATOM, and REST; and being unable to insert nodes into a nodeset when all the nodes had been deleted was painful! Thankfully, those days are now behind us. :)

But just because none of these features are unanticipated, doesn't mean that this document is not an important one.

For a start, in many places it's clearer than XForms 1.0; although W3C documents are always a team effort, the improving coherence is due to a lot of hard work from John Boyer, as he's often prepared to go the extra mile when writing an explanation or giving additional examples. (A sense of what has changed can be seen by looking at the version with all differences highlighted.)

Secondly, whilst I might have a moan that the new features were slow coming, the point is that they indicate the commitment on the part of the working group to solve real world problems, and more importantly, they show how the underlying XForms architecture easily lends itself to the addition of new features in a natural way.

And finally, with the new submission features of version 1.1, and the already powerful XML-handling that was a hallmark of version 1.0, XForms becomes the obvious choice for quickly creating rich internet applications that use ATOM, WebDAV, and REST. That XForms does 'come of age' is crucial if, alongside the proprietary offerings of Adobe and Microsoft, there is to be an approach to building internet applications that is based purely on open standards.