XForms support for Firefox takes a major blow

In an effort to reduce costs, Novell has cut it's Copenhagen R&D department and with it put one of the major XForms extention developers out of a job. Allan Beaufour, in his blog, explained how he hopes to be able to finish work the XForms extension and get it to 1.0 status, but understandably is lacking motivation.

"Talk about bad timing. Firefox 1.5 is about to hit the shops, opening up for XForms — and I believe XForms in general is starting to pick up speed. I'm really sad to leave the colleagues, the office, and the XForms project in general." Beaufour said.

XForms is the future of online forms as envisioned by the W3C. Drawing on other W3C standards like XML Schema, XPath, and XML Events, XForms tries to address some of the limitations with the current HTML forms model. Features that most web forms have could include the ability to do client-side validation, event handling and declaring interdependence of one form element upon another.

In HTML, much of this functionality had to be written in large JavaScript libraries that had to be updated and maintained as forms changed. XForms incorporates much of this functionality internally which can be utilized by a form author using simple XML markup.

"I hope to find the motivation, and possibly a 'sponsor' to at least get XForms 1.0 done for Firefox. I'll probably hang around irc until the end of November, and try to do some Mozilla work." Beaufour said.

View: XForms Website