I was wandering around the W3C site, as I am apt to do, and I finally took a little time to read up on XForms. There's a good intro for people who approach XForms from an HTML background. It explains how to do with XForms what you do today with the form element.

When I get a chance to upgrade to the next Firefox Alpha, I'll have to try out a couple things. Here are some benefits that make XForms worth looking into:

• Multiple submissions and the replace attribute allow a form to take action without refreshing the entire page.
• Built-in Validation using the required, constraint, and type properties. These will simplify a whole lot of script, I expect. At the least, they should make the purpose of scripts much more clear.
• The new output and range controls. Output does another thing that we do now in script. It puts the value of a form field into the HTML elsewhere. Range is basically a slider control.

As well, there are new submission methods to try out and access to XML data for initial values. Lots of things to play with. I've come around to XForms because I think it's designed with the knowledge of what we've really been doing with forms in HTML for all this time.