1.1 The Past, Present, and Future of Web Forms

Scientists and science fiction writers have long predicted many of the things now being made possible by web forms. For example, in a 1945 article in The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush wrote about a hypertext network he dubbed a "Memex." Even at this conceptual stage, the thought of using forms to access data came naturally, particularly in terms of drilling down through vast stores of information: "One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections." How did such a technology come to be in real life?

Shortly after the initial tempering of HTML, various individuals began considering the usefulness of forms alongside hypertext. HTML Version 2.0, as presented in a document called Request for Comments (RFC) 1866, was the first time that web forms were seriously considered for standardization. That RFC captured HTML as found in common use prior to June 1994. At this point, HTML already included forms, thanks to a 1993 proposal called HTML+.

Care and maintenance of the HTML family of specifications have since been handed over to the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. The last non-XML-based version of HTML was version 4.01, which didn't change forms processing much. New development of the standard is taking place on a closely related technology called XHTML, where the X indicates an XML foundation. XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 were largely concerned with details of the transition to XML and ways to combine vocabularies, not with major changes to the language.

XHTML 2.0, in contrast, is making some improvements that aren't compatible with earlier flavors of HTML. The largest such change is the adoption of XForms as a replacement for the older HTML forms technology. As of August 2003, XHTML 2.0 is still under development, though it's clear that XForms will play a major role in the future of XHTML. Before we discuss XForms, however, a review of the older HTML forms technology will be helpful.