XML News from Tuesday, January 2, 2007

The W3C XForms working group has posted the fifth public working draft of XForms 1.1. "XForms 1.1 refines the XML processing platform introduced by [XForms 1.0] by adding several new submission capabilities, action handlers, utility functions, user interface improvements, and helpful datatypes as well as a more powerful action processing facility, including conditional, iterated and background execution, the ability to manipulate data arbitrarily and to access event context information." Changes since 1.0 include:

• PUT and DELETE as forms actions
• HTTP headers can be controlled from the XForm submission.
• power, luhn, current, choose, id and property XPath extension functions
• An email address datatype
• An ID card number datatype
• A prompt action element
• An xforms-close event
• An xforms-submit-serialize event
• Inline rendering of non-text media types

The major change in this draft is the addition of a truly insane idea known as chameleon schemas. In brief, the namespace of an XForm is allowed to change depending on which document you put it in. This more or less makes namespaces completely pointless, and is based on two mistaken beliefs:

• The purpose of namespaces is merely to disambiguate the same names that appear in two different vocabularies.
• The intersection of the set of users smart enough to author XForms and the set of users too stupid to understand namespace scoping rules is non-empty.

I've argued against this change, but the working group seems hell-bent on defenestrating namespaces. This is going to make writing generic XForms processors and libraries much harder.