XForms的前景蓝图

XForms: The big picture and the details

Xforms的前景

An interesting comment showed up on my prior post that seemed worth discussing as part of getting around to talking about what XFDL does for (and with) XForms.

在我上一篇文章中，有一个有趣的评论值得讨论，这个评论是关于XFDL能在Xforms上和为Xforms做些什么？

In the last post, I talked about what XForms does and what it doesn't do from the big picture perspective. XForms does seek to standardize the language for the core information processing asset expressed within a form. XForms does not seek to standardize the exact presentation of a user interface. XForms delegates this task to different XML host languages like XHTML or XFDL (or others in the future like, hopefully, VoiceXML). These host languages exist to satisfy different requirements that exist beyond the core information processing requirements, but XForms allow us to design the underlying application once and handle presentment and other orthogonal requirements as the separate issues that they are.

在最后一篇文章中，我从大的方面来讨论了Xforms的用处。Xforms的目的是寻求一种在表单中表达和处理有核心信息数据的标准语言，而不是寻求标准表示用户界面的语言。Xforms把这个任务放在不用的XML主机语言上实现（例如XHTML或XFDL，或者将来的一些语言，如VoiceXML）。这些主机语言能满足不同的需求，却很难满足核心信息处理的需求。Xforms允许我们在重点应用中只设计一次，就可以处理相关的需求。

The comment came in saying that one thing XForms doesn't do is allow the URL of a submission to be dynamically calculated. This is a technical limitation that does not affect the big picture of what we're trying to achieve with XForms. The XForms language does contain some technical limitations like this. Many of them are being addressed in XForms 1.1. This issue in particular should be addressed in the very next working draft of XForms 1.1.

接下来的评论表示，有一个Xforms无法做的是允许动态计算表单提交的URL，这是一个技术缺陷，但并不会影响我们从Xforms中获得的好处。Xforms语言存在一定类似的技术缺陷，大部分问题都在Xforms1.1中有所陈述。这个问题将会在Xforms1.1的working draft中特别讨论。

However, because we have to deliver products that can be used to build applications now, it sometimes happens that implementations have to lead the standard with custom extensions until the standard comes along and specifies the common way that everyone on the working group agrees is the way the language will express a feature.

然而，由于我们现在开发用来构建应用的产品，有时应用实现不得不在标准基础上自行扩展，直到定义出来一个通用的方法，使得工作组的每个成员都赞同。

In XFDL, we make relatively few changes to XForms because we want our documents to be as conformant as possible. However, this particular issue of a dynamic URL comes up in almost all of the forms applications we have every deployed, so we did not feel we could make our next release of Workplace Forms without some ability to do a dynamic URL on an XForms submission. At the same time, we do like it to be clear to the form author when an extension is being used. As a result, the addition was made using an attribute in the XFDL namespace. This makes it easier to find those bits of our XForms-based documents that will need special attention when trying to get them to interoperate with other XForms implementations.

在XFDL中，我们为了使我们的文档尽可能地符合Xforms标准，而对XFDL作了小量修改。但是，动态URL这个问题几乎出现在我们所部署的表单中，因此，我不认为在下一个Workplace Forms的版本中在Xforms的表单提交中不具有动态URL的功能，还有，当使用了扩展应用时，我们还可能让表单设计者清楚。因此，在XFDL名字空间中使用了一个额外属性，这样使得在与其他Xforms应用交互操作时，比较容易找到这些特殊属性。

In the upcoming release of Workplace Forms, you can create XForms-based applications that include a dynamic URL component by using an xfdl:actionref attribute instead of an action in the xforms:submission. The content of xfdl:actionref is an XPath expression whose result is the node containing the desired URL. Of course, the full power of XForms calculations can be brought to bear on that node to allow dynamic calculation of all or any portion of the final URL.

In XForms 1.1, I am expecting a more general mechanism that will allow the instance data to be used to set not just the URL, but eventually many of the other parameters too.