Web forms: the next generation

XForms are the future of data entry on the Web. Their advancement to W3C Candidate Recommendation status in November 2002 has been followed by a variety of implementations. Although they are not yet natively supported by the major browsers, it is becoming increasingly obvious that they will be a central component of the Web. This column describes a simple digital library application of XForms that illustrates their superiority over the current generation of HTML forms.