Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

But better late than never, I always say, particularly when mentioning a new W3C official recommendation a week after it’s announced. My bad.

XForms 1.0 became an official recommendation on 14 October and is deemed an improvement over HTML for handling electronic forms as it has the ability to separate purpose, presentation and results using XML. HTML has become increasingly limiting for developers and is not as flexible as it might be for smartphones and handheld devices. The W3C sees XForms as the solution and, additionally, it is an open standard as opposed to proprietary web forms technologies offered by Microsoft (InfoPath) and Adobe (PDF). In practical terms, technologies based on XForms allow the the same form to be served up to a PDA, a mobile phone, or desktop computer with identical functionality.

Like any technology, its success is intrinsically linked to the support it receives from the vendors. So far, Adobe, IBM, Novell, Oracle, and Sun have been involded in the development of the standard, but Microsoft abstained as it pursued InfoPath (or XDocs as it was once called). Why am I not surprised by this?

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