Proposal: XForms integration

[Daniel Vogelheim <Daniel.Vogelheim@sun.com>]

Hi all,

I would like to propose integrating W3C XForms into the OASIS format.

The proposal itself is rather brief, since I'm not suggesting any 
changes to W3C XForms, but rather to adopt the <xforms:model> as is. 
XForms is designed to be embedded into other formats, where the rules 
for the embedding are delegated to a 'host language'. The proposal 
essentially defines such an embedding for XForms. The changes to the 
OASIS format are rather minimal, mainly due to the fact that 1) we 
already support a control/model separation similar to XForms, and 2) I 
propose keeping our current set of controls.

I believe keeping the controls makes a lot sense, since 1) we have 
already specified a complete set of controls, and 2) XForms employs an 
<xforms:input> control which is intended to be rendered differently 
depending on its run-time binding, which makes it hard (er, impossible, 
actually) to keep a stable layout. This is of particular importance for 
exchanging documents between implementations, in that we'd really want 
documents to be rendered the same on different applications, which is 
hard to do if one doesn't specify what a control is supposed to look like.

The list of changes thus boils down to:
1) allowing <xforms:model> inside <office:forms> elements.
2) allowing xforms:bind="..." attributes on controls
3) allowing xforms:submission="..." attributes on buttons


Sincerely,
Daniel

xforms-proposal.sxw