XForms

This is an archived page. It's not actively maintained.

Obsolete since Gecko 19 (Firefox 19 / Thunderbird 19 / SeaMonkey 2.16)
This feature is obsolete. Although it may still work in some browsers, its use is discouraged since it could be removed at any time. Try to avoid using it.

Note: Support for XForms was removed from Firefox in Firefox 19. See the HTML Forms Guide for approaches to creating forms in HTML5.

XForms Essentials
An online book giving you a guided tour of XForms.
XForms were envisioned as the future of online forms as envisioned by the W3C. Drawing on other W3C standards like XML Schema, XPath, and XML Events, XForms tried to address some of the limitations of the current HTML forms model. However, XForms never gained traction and is now considered obsolete. Other strengths that XForms brings to the table is the separation of data from presentation, strong data typing, the ability to submit XML data to servers instead of name/value pairs, and a descriptive way to author forms so that they can be displayed by a wide variety of devices. XForms is a W3C specification.
XForms Tutorial and Cookbook
XForms in Wikibook Format - Over 50 examples tested with Firefox.

XForms support can be added to Firefox and SeaMonkey by installing the Mozilla XForms extension. This extension, while supporting a significant subset of the XForms 1.0 and 1.1 candidate recommendations, is not actively maintained any more since about 2010. The last official release has been done for Firefox 3.6 and is available for download on addons.mozilla.org.
For more details about the future of the Mozilla XForms extension see this blog post.

Documentation

Implementation status
Implementation status of the Mozilla XForms extension
Building
Get started with building your own XForms extensions from source.
Troubleshooting tips for XForms
A small collection of tips for troubleshooting common problems with XForms forms.
Mozilla XForms specials
Explains where, and how, Mozilla XForms deviates or extends the XForms 1.0 specification.
XForms custom controls
Custom controls lets the form author "skin" each XForms control through XBL, and create f.x. an SVG input control.
XForms user preferences
A description of the about:config variables that XForms uses.
XForms API reference
XForms interfaces documentation.
XForms UI Elements reference
XForms user interface elements documentation.

Community

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Tools

Extensions, HTML, XHTML, XML, XPath