Data-driven styling

Since data-entry fields can be shown and hidden as other data is entered, it is important to provide some sort of indication to the user that the form has changed--particularly on large forms. formsPlayer makes various highlighting features available to the form author in a simple and concise way.

In the following screenshot we can see two highlighting techniques being employed at the same time; one is a yellow highlight that lasts for 2 seconds, and indicates to the user that some controls that were not previously available are now available, whilst the second technique draws the user's attention to some status information that is shown in green, for about 8 seconds:

Once the highlights have timed out, the form looks like this:

XForms allows us to define both the conditions for the highlighting and the highlighting itself in simple mark-up, and it is easy to add other effects--for example, a red background when a control becomes invalid.