The History of XForms

XForms was first conceived in the late 1990's, with a W3C working group producing the first draft of a specification in 2000. Within a year, people realized that an XML grammar that interoperates with XHTML would be needed, and finally in August 2003, a recommendation was submitted.

Several companies went to work creating XForms interpreters that could run with your browser; several companies have produced XForms tools including the Novell XForms plug in for Microsoft Internet Explorer (http://developer.novell.com/xforms/), the Mozilla/Firefox XForms extension has just been released in beta form (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/), and many products from companies such as Formfaces, XFormation, Altova, and Hyfinity. In addition, there are several open source implementations including those from Chiba, DENG, Zen Interactif, X-Smiles, and Orbeon, as well as several companies working to integrate them into their applications, including Sun, Oracle, and IBM.

Macromedia is the first company to support XForms as a core component of a Web authoring system, with the introduction of ColdFusion's XForms support. With ColdFusion we can now implement XForms with pretty much the same code we've become comfortable with in developing HTML forms, and still use the XForms extensibility and interoperability features.

NOTE

There's no such thing as an 'XForm.' XForms is like 'elk', it describes one or all of them.