E-forms standard finalized | CNET News.com

E-forms standard finalized | CNET News.com"The main standards body for the Web released the final specification Tuesday for XForms, a standard that will compete in the growing market for electronic forms.
XForms is an implementation of XML (Extensible Markup Language) designed for creating interactive forms that can automatically shuttle data to and from corporate computing resources such as databases and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working on XForms for several years to address limitations of forms based on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the main language of the Web. Tuesday's release of the "recommendation" for XForms 1.0 represents the final step in acceptance and publishing of the standard."

This is a fascinating case study in the standards world, as Adobe, Microsoft, and other major ISVs have been at best ambivalent about XForms; apparently customer demand rather than vendor enthusiasm will determine the fate of the initiative -- e.g., if the US federal government opted to require XForms support for its forms-processing software, that would change the story overnight.