XForms 1.0 Third Edition becomes a Recommendation

On October 29th, the W3C released XForms 1.0 Third Edition as a Recommendation. The main changes are some important clarifications of how parts of XForms work, although there is one new feature--authors can now indicate which version of XForms their forms are targeting.

One clarification concerns more detail on how the rebuild and refresh events should behave, which closes off a few grey areas. Another comprises important information about how controls with an @id should be handled inside repeat; the issue of how triggers, for example, should behave in repeat has been undefined for a long time, so this marks a useful development.

There is also one new feature, which gives authors the ability to indicate which version of XForms their form requires. The new version attribute on the model element can be set to values such as "1.0", "1.1", and so on. If a processor doesn't support the version of XForms that the author has indicated then the xforms-version-error event should be dispatched.

Whilst the key features for web application support will come in XForms 1.1, the Third Edition of XForms 1.0 still contains some welcome refinements.