Rising to Mark's challenge, here is a sketch of of a proposal that
is both syntactic sugar for a subset of XForms and an incremental
improvement on HTML4. The data model and contraints are implied
by the annotations provided with the input fields.
Input fields have the following attributes:
ref: an XPath expression binding the field to the data
e.g. ref="details/age"
type: an enumerated value from a small set as per HTML4
with the addition of {integer, number, date}
verify: an XPath expression evaluating to a boolean
pattern: a regular expression constraining the input value
min, max and step: numbers acting as constraints with step
being used for ranges
required: an XPath expression evaluating to a boolean
hint, help and alert: corresponding to XForms elements
(use HTML4 label element for the label text)
Output fields have the following attribute
value: an XPath expression evaluating to a string
Obviously there are many other details missing from the above,
e.g. initialization and submission, selection controls, repeating
controls, and autocompletion etc. However, I hope it serves to
indicate a potential way to blend ideas from both WF2 and XForms.
Dave Raggett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> W3C lead for multimodal interaction
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett +44 1225 866240 (or 867351)
