Processing XForms in HTML5-Enabled Browsers

Forms technology for the World Wide Web has developed along two lines. The XForms strain has worked for a cleaner separation of concerns and supports more complex bindings between user interface and data. The HTML strain has focused on the user interface, defining new widgets and in HTML5 adding type definitions to form elements to enable native in-form validation. Some XForms implementations translate XForms elements into HTML widgets plus executable code. But HTML5 also defines new Javascript APIs browsers should support. The new facilities of HTML5-enabled browsers can be used to support XForms near-natively. We explain how.