XForms and XHTML 2.0 represent an important shift in Web applications, replacing complicated, hard-to-maintian scripting with declarative markup, and fully separating content from presentation. This session will cover up-to-the-minute news on the status of both of these new specifications, as well as related technologies.

XForms: Current HTML forms are nearly a decade old, and don't take advantage of XML, for either input or output. This new W3C specification takes a "clean slate" approach, and defines an XML-centric approach to the general collecting data from browsers, hand held computers, phones, voice browsers, and even paper. In 2002, XForms went through a "Last Call" phase and proceeded to the implementation phase.

XHTML 2.0: The first version of XHTML used XML syntax but didn't add any major features. XHTML 1.1 introduced modularization, but didn't represent any major changes to familiar features. In contrast, XHTML 2.0 breaks strict backwards-compatibility in order to fully realize a semantic language that is completely free from presentation bias. The first Working Draft XHTML 2.0 came out in 2002.

XML Events: Both XForms and XHTML 2.0 share this common specification, which provides XML languages with the ability to uniformly integrate event listeners and associated event handlers with Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 event interfaces [DOM2], with an interoperable way of associating behaviors with document-level markup.

What's new in these specifications? Who has implemented XForms already? How is browser support for XHTML 2.0 coming along? When will the final specifications be available? Attend this session to catch up on the latest.