XForms cometh to PHP ! Throw out HTML_Quickform?

PHP Architect has an article in their June 2006 issue about using XForms within PHP5. If you don’t know what XForms is/are, you’d better look into it. It’s basically a way to describe forms on your page and all the data validation rules entirely in XML. The form presentation and validation capabilities of it are kind of like HTML_Quickform on crack. Of course, there’s always a rub. No browsers natively support XForms. The article in PHPArch uses the FormFaces JavaScript to get things to work. But I don’t like the way FormFaces comes off. They tout both a GPL license and a commercial one but then they mask the JavaScript so you can’t extend it or see how it’s actually working. That smells like a temporary GPL license to me. So, I don’t think you could do XForms on the client side just yet. It’d be nice if someone would step up and create a server-based solution for XForms in PHP. Maybe I’ll do that myself. In the meantime though, the Quickform folks are already busy planning HTML_Quickform2, a PHP5 version of their form production code. That will have to do for now I suppose.