Re: [xsl] I have the XSLT, now need to make it usable as user-input form?

Subject: Re: [xsl] I have the XSLT, now need to make it usable as user-input form?
From: Andrew Watt <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 08:11:07 +0100
At 01:08 19/04/2003 -0400, you wrote:
This should be possible with regular HTML form submission as well. Basically imagine that you have one big TEXTAREA in html with the XML in it, and a submit button. THe submit button will simply post whatever's in the textarea back the server.

Simon,


One difference is that XForms will submit well-formed XML data with no visible sign of XML in the interface exposed to the user. It is ok for XML geeks to, for example, enter XML in a textarea, but most users of forms don't speak XML.

Also, won't the data submitted actually be a name-value pair from an HTML form? The value may well-formed XML but the whole submission won't be.

That might preclude passing the submitted HTML forms instance data to an XSLT application (since the source isn't well-formed) whereas XForms instance data, because it is well-formed can be passed straight to XSLT. Of course a little pre-processing could strip off the name part of the name-value pair from an HTML submission.


On the server side the application that receives the data (could be XSLT ...) can simply pull the instance data out of that parameter and then do whatever it wants with it, write it to a file (e.g. using EXSLT document()) write it to a database, verify it, etc.

One viewpoint in a recent XForms list discussion is that dynamic creation of XForms documents, for example using XSLT, will be an important approach.


What you said about the way XForms will automatically handle updating the instance, is cool. Still it seems like the necessity for a user-agent implementation is going to make it a slow slog to get XForms into real world use.

Your assumption, it seems, is that XForms will only/primarily work as Web forms. XForms can, in principle, be used as Web forms but many of the implementations will use XForms in proprietary clients. I know of one company, for example, which is intending using XForms as part of a sophisticated XML-based workflow.


I find it interesting that Microsoft is reserving InfoPath, which functionally is very XForms-like, only for the enterprise editions of Office. They, presumably, see a proprietary client as adding lots of value, to the point that they are reserving it, mostly, for their best paying enterprise customers. MS uses XSLT as part of the processing.

Andrew Watt



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