I have been a member of the W3C Forms Working Group since its inception in early 2000, and it gave me great pleasure to be able to host the group's recent three day face to face meeting on the Google campus February 9th - 11th. This Working Group develops an XML vocabulary that is used for creating forms-based Web interaction. During our meeting, the group spent its time finishing up the test suite for its current suite of specifications. A significant portion of the meeting was devoted to designing the necessary APIs for implementing the Forms technology within current-day browsers via pluggable JavaScript. Implementing the Forms technology in a cross-browser fashion using open JavaScript libraries holds the promise of delivering cross-browser, cross-platform Web interaction that is authored almost exclusively via declarative markup, which helps authors create Web interaction without having to program. In addition to myself , meeting participants included:
- John Boyer, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM and current chair of the W3C Forms Working Group
- Erik Bruchez, developer of Orbeon Forms , an XForms-based open source forms solution
- Leigh Klotz, software architect for Xerox Corporation
- Ulrich Nicolas Lissé, XML Technologist and Standards Architect at DreamLab Technologies
- Steven Pemberton, from CWI, an institute for research in mathematics and computer science
- Nick Van den Bleeken, Research & Development Manager at Inventive Designers, a document and intelligent eForms automation solutions provider
- Charlie Wiecha, Manager of Multichannel Web Interaction at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
A breakdown of the agenda is available.
