REDESIGN OF XFORMS + XFDL AND ENRICHING WITH FEATURES FROM XFA

Abstract

At the time HTML was developed, it was identified that the simplest way to create web pages, was to use declarative tags. Initially, web was only perceived as the data distribution medium and not for data collection. But as web pages became more and more interactive, HTML was no longer sufficient. Today, we find form code containing a large amount of scripting. To simplify coding of such forms, W3C introduced a declarative alternative to scripting called XForms (An XML based language). XForms is a device-independent standard and requires a specific presentation language like XFDL, XFA for display of information. XFDL (eXtensible Forms Description Language) has graduated to include XForms whereas XFA (XML Forms Architecture) still follows the approach without XForms. Though XFA does not include XForms, it has certain important features like the prototype tag which are missing in XFDL. But XFDL provides for more security, important for e-commerce transactions. After a detailed comparison...