Write XForms That Work Across Browsers

The W3C has developed the XForms standard for the presentation and
collection of form data. XForms provides a number of advantages over
existing HTML forms technology: "By splitting traditional XHTML forms
into three parts -- XForms model, instance data, and user interface --
it separates presentation from content, allows reuse, gives strong
typing -- reducing the number of round-trips to the server, as well
as offering device independence and a reduced need for scripting."
XForms documents feature a data model that contains one or more XML
instance documents. The form manipulates such an instance document and
provides for the submission of that XML to a back-end system. This
article shows how XHTML and XForms documents should be hosted and
written to ensure that your end users have the best experience with
your XForms-based applications. Although the article attempts to show
a thorough solution for a variety of deployment configurations, not
all scenarios and configurations can be covered. XForms is intended
to be used embedded within other markup. The most widely used, and the
focus of this article, is within XHTML. There is a need to write your
XHTML documents following some guidelines to ensure a smooth experience
of a variety of browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's
Firefox, X-Smiles, and Opera, to name some. As of this writing, the
only desktop browser that natively supports XForms is X-Smiles.
Therefore, an add-on, or sometimes referred to as a plugin, is needed
for a browser to process the XForms content. There are also solutions
that convert XForms markup to ECMAScript and HTML, which are more
widely supported in deployed browsers. Information