Think about how many times a day you use forms, electronic or otherwise. On the Web, forms have become commonplace for search engines, polls, surveys, electronic commerce, and even on-line applications. Nearly all user interaction on the Web is through forms of some sort. This ubiquitous technology, however, is showing its age. It predates XML by half a decade, which is a contributing factor to some of its limitations:
Poor integration with XML
Limited features make even common tasks dependent on scripting
Device dependent, running well only on
HTML is probably the world's most important data format, and so changes come very slowly. But the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group has big plans for HTML.
The current HTML standard is actually now XHTML 1.0 Second Edition, which is a set of minor changes to HTML to turn it into valid XML while still allowing current Web browsers to handle it.
The big news is XHTML 2.0, a from-the-ground-up rethinking of HTML that keeps its strengths while ditching some long-standing stupidities or legacy items. It will not be fully backward-compatible
[April 06, 2004] W3C Releases Candidate Recommendations for XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0). The W3C XKMS Working Group has addressed Last Call issues relating to the April 18, 2003 XKMS Working Draft and has now approved publication of Candidate Recommendations for XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) and XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) Bindings. The XKMS Candidate Recommendation period will last for at least six months in order for the WG to collect implementation feedback and evaluate implementation experience.
In 1997 Sun Microsystems and Jakob Nielson, the noted web design and usability guru, were granted a patent on a "Method and system for implementing hypertext scroll attributes" by the US Patent Office. The patent describes the process of using a string to define an external anchor for an HTML document. The string is defined in the link to the HTML document, and the web browser, on loading the document defined by the link, will scroll to the first occurrence of the text string within the document -- hardly an innovation.
The first sign that this, like
RSS/XML