Data submission

XForms allows for many different types of data submission, providing an enormous degree of flexibility when talking to back-end systems. Data can be submitted in formats ranging from pure XML, to XML with embedded data (such as images or Word documents), through to the simple serialisation of name/value pairs. (This latter feature allows XForms to communicate with server-side systems that were designed to be used with HTML forms.)

In addition to this wide range of possible data formats, XForms also supports a variety of protocols. This means that XForms not only allows for data to be transferred using HTTP, but can also cope with the saving and loading of local files, as well as transferring data via email and even saving to local ODBC databases.