by Kevin Yank

Over the past decade, the World Wide Web has grown from an academic curiosity to a popular and powerful new medium for doing business. Thanks to the early pioneers of the Web who wanted a simple means for users to submit information for processing by CGI programs, a world of rich, interactive applications has grown around the austere HTML form tags (form, input, select, option and textarea).

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently released XForms 1.0 as a candidate recommendation. XForms is an XML-compliant tag language designed to replace the venerable form tags in HTML / XHTML 1.x with a powerful new model for data collection for use in XHTML 2.0, among other standards.

While the user experience for the average Web user would be little changed by the adoption of XForms (the only new widget proposed is a ranged selection, or "slider" control), XForms makes sweeping changes to how forms are created, validated, and processed. XForms also cater to non-visual and non-desktop browsers (such as audible browsers for the visually impaired and microbrowsers on PDAs and cell phones) by reducing the need for developers to provide visual presentation information in their form tags.