Since URIs are often conveyed as strings it's tempting to manipulate them as such, but it's better--and safer--to delegate URI manipulation to special functions. These can then have their own unit-tests, which will take into account the edge-cases that can catch us out.

The next big task that I'm about to tackle on the Ubiquity XForms project is support for Safari and Chrome. In general, UXF has seemed to work pretty well in the WebKit-based browsers whenever I've tried it, but I've never run exhaustive tests.

We're pleased to be launching two new initiatives to help people who are interested in XForms.

The first is the all new XForms Developer Zone web-site -- or xformsdz, as we're calling it.

Whilst the Developer Zone will be unashamedly biased towards XForms, within that, we'll have discussions, articles, code snippets, and tutorials about any XForms processor we can find, and any application framework in which it's used.

To accompany the web-site, we're also launching a regular newsletter, and a London XForms User Group.

Co-ordinating code reviews, commits and issues.

Having spent the majority of my last four years working on the likes of Ubiquity XForms, Hubbub and UBX, I've found it rather nostalgic to get back to working on Ubiquity formsPlayer during the last few weeks. So much so, in fact, that I decided to take the opportunity to delve back through the source control logs and brush up on the old girl's history a bit.

Recently I added an initial implementation of the navindex and accesskey attributes to Ubiquity XForms. Both attributes enable an XForms author to improve the navigation experience for their users; navindex by defining the order in which form controls are navigated and accesskey by defining shortcuts for navigating to particular controls.

One of our customers recently asked:

"I have a question on how we can open an XForms page from a non-XForms page. We are trying to have a summary page which is a non-XForm page and we would like to try to open an already existing XForms page by populating data on to it dynamically, by clicking on a component in the summary page. More like a summary-to-detail functionality....

We are trying to find the best way to do this."

It's an interesting question, and although we have worked out a couple of ways of looking at this on the client side, I thought the best answer for now was to user the server.

In a recent code review on the Ubiquity XForms project, the question of whether to test for an element by name or properties came up. In this post we look at the benefits that can be had from using duck-typing as a way to manage objects' functionality, rather than the more usual hierarchical solutions.

This presentation by Mark Birbeck was part of XML-in-Practice 2008, organised by the IDEAlliance, and showed developers how to use XForms in their Ajax applications.

Determining the behaviour of an application at run-time using parameters is a well-established practice. But whilst it's possible with command-line and server-side applications, the scope for passing information to client-side internet applications is limited. With the growth in internet-facing desktop applications, widgets and gadgets, there is a need to pass parameters directly to the application, rather than via a server, and this post looks at how that might be achieved.

The Ubiquity library provides a range of open source components--from Ajax libraries to browser extensions--that work together to deliver a fresh approach to web application building.

This presentation by Mark Birbeck was given at the Kings of Code conference.

Something which was part of the early design concepts from the XHTML Role Attribute Module, which has got a little lost, is that elements from any language can provide a handy source of role values too.

Ian Forrester interviewed Mark Birbeck whilst they were both at XTech 2008. Subjects mentioned range from XForms, Ajax, Sidewinder, ODF, unobtrusive JavaScript, XUL, standards adoption, New Labour, Hegel's idealism, the Ajax Community, and the Ubiquity XForms processor.

Vertex Financial Services, parent group of leading technology suppliers, 1st - The Exchange, recently announced that Wesleyan Assurance Society has become the first organisation to go live with the new Adviser Evolution technology, a financial services application that makes extensive use of XForms.

XForms is a mark-up language from the W3C for describing all kinds of interactive user interfaces, from simple name and address forms to shopping-carts, through to long and detailed forms (such as mortgage and life insurance applications) to desktop applications.

The team at webBackplane has expertise and experience in XForms that is unparalleled.

Recently, we've had a number of enquiries about embedding formsPlayer inside third-party applications, as more people are realising the benefits of using XForms as a dynamic UI framework. Fortunately, formsPlayer exposes a set of COM interfaces explicitly for this purpose and a number of commercial solutions exist that are currently relying on them. With this in mind, I've posted a tutorial article to The Code Project, one of the leading .NET developer resources, which demonstrates integration of these interfaces in a simple C# browser-like application.

This presentation by Mark Birbeck was part of the Reinventing the Mobile Browsing Experience Through Ajax industry panel, held at WWW2007.

I've just written a new tutorial, describing how to write an XForms application that overlays data from a BBC Backstage feed onto a Google Map. The application is pretty short and straightforward, but it also provides a cogent illustration of the advantages that the XForms model can bring, even to non-XForms user interfaces.

One of our customers in the insurance industry recently required us to provide proper Tablet PC stylus support in formsPlayer. The latest version implements our first cut of this feature, allowing hand-written data entry into the XForms input, secret and textarea controls.

An important feature of formsPlayer 1.5 has been the development of richer form controls, implemented using XBL and SVG. The screenshot here shows a simple XForms output control styled to look like an LED display: