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Improving the Web Forms Experience
CWI and W3C
Kruislaan 413
1098 SJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl
www.cwi.nl/~steven
Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, The Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, a nationally-funded research centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the first non-military Internet site in Europe.
Steven's research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support the user. At the end of the 80's he built a style-sheet based hypertext system called Views.
Steven has been involved with the World Wide Web since the beginning. He organised two workshops at the first World Wide Web Conference in 1994, chaired the first W3C Style Sheets workshop, and the first W3C Internationalisation workshop. He was a member of the CSS Working Group from its start, and is a long-time member (now chair) of the HTML Working Group, and co-chair of the XForms Working Group. He is co-author of (amongst other things) HTML 4, CSS, XHTML and XForms.
Steven is also Editor-in-Chief of ACM/interactions.
HTML Forms, introduced in 1993, were the basis of the e-commerce revolution. After 10 years experience, it has become clear how to improve on them, for the end user, the author, and the owners of the services that the forms are addressing. XForms is a new technology, announced in October 2003, intended to replace HTML Forms.
The advantages of XForms include:
The presenter is one of the authors of the XForms specifications, and is chair of the Forms Working Group that produced the technology.
This tutorial works from a basis of HTML Forms, and introduces XForms step-by-step. It covers essentially all of XForms except some technical details about events, and no more than a passing reference to the use of Schemas.
Emphasis is on how to improve the user experience, and how XForms improves accessibility and device independence, and makes the author’s life easy in producing a better experience.
The essence is to separate what is being returned from how the values are filled in.
The model specifies the values
being collected (the instance), and their related logic:
An essential difference with HTML is that XForms controls are intent-based rather than presentation oriented.
Rather than specifying that a control consists of radio buttons, or a menu, XForms specifies for instance that a control selects one item from a list of items. CSS or similar can be used to provide the necessary presentation.
This way the same XForm can be used across different devices without change.
XForms has been designed to allow much to be checked by the browser, such as
This reduces the need for round trips to the server or for extensive script-based solutions, and improves the user experience by giving immediate feedback on what is being filled in.
Because XForms uses declarative markup to declare properties of values, and to build relationships between values, it is much easier for the author to create complicated, adaptive forms, and doesn't rely on scripting.
An HTML Form converted to XForms looks pretty much the same, but when you start to build forms that HTML wasn't designed for, XForms becomes much simpler.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, XForms uses a number of existing XML technologies, such as
This has a dual benefit:
Data can be pre-loaded into a form from external sources.
Existing Schemas can be used.
It integrates with SOAP and XML RPC.
Doesn't require new server infrastructure.
Thanks to the intent-based controls, the same form can be delivered without change to a traditional browser, a PDA, a mobile phone, a voice browser, and even some more exotic emerging clients such as an Instant Messenger.
This greatly eases providing forms to a wide audience, since forms only need to be authored once.
Regular HTML forms uses
Wizards
Shopping-basket-style forms
Editing XML
Spreadsheets
As output transformation
As you would expect with a new technology, first adopters are within companies and vertical industries that have control over the software environment used.
Major companies and industries that are already using XForms include Bristol-Myers-Squibb (pharmaceutical), Hewlett-Packard, Remia - a major Dutch food manufacturer, Frauenhofer (known for MP3), Daiwa - a Japanese Bank, Verifone - a payment company, for configuring petrol pumps, the entire British Insurance industry (via Origo and Polaris), the US Navy, UK Government (Planning Inspectorate), German Shipbuilders ... and several more that are on the point of being announced.
As more industries adopt XForms, the expectation is that it will then spread out into horizontal use.