Who will come to the aid of web forms?

Although the XForms specification is a W3C Recommendation and bills itself as “The Next Generation of Web Forms,” it has yet to see broad adoption.

We can debate the reasons for XForms’ “success,” but I think the crucial point, once again, is the absence of Microsoft, the biggest player in the browser market. The XForms working group does include representatives from Oracle, Novell, IBM and Sun, among others.

Novell and IBM, working with the Mozilla Foundation, have just announced the launch of an XForms project. IBM is already familiar with XForms. Big Blue has its own project, IBM XML Forms Package.

The activity around XForms and web applications shows a real appetite for changing the status quo with the future in mind. The big threat, as I see it, is Longhorn and its new Internet Explorer. XAML and the Avalon rendering engine will let it do some impressive things.