If you have browse the Web at all, you probably use the forms more often than you realize. Nearly all the on-line interaction (as opposed to the static text delivery) takes place through some kind of the form. To enhance the use of the forms on Web, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sponsored the development of an XForms.

Instead of further altering the existing forms language that is the part of an HTML, the W3C membership agreed that the new approach was necessary. Several years later, this has become XForms 1.0, an official Recommendation of W3C.

Like an XHTML, SVG, and RSS, XForms is also an XML-based language written with the tags that can be identified by surrounding the angle brackets. ( the XML purists perfer to call these elements) Learning the XForms is largely a matter of understanding what an individual elements do, as well as how do they interrelate. One difference is that the XForms provides a several more elements than the form authors might be accustomed to. As a result, several tasks that would have otherwise required the complicated scripting can be accomplished declaratively, just by putting a right elements in the place.

XForms was been designed with a classic XHTML author in mind, so it includes the simplified approach that is easy to write about and as powerful as classic the HTML forms without a script. This is called unofficially, as "lazy authoring" as an tribute to a geek ethic of beneficially avoiding the unnecessary work.

Structurally, the form can be throught of having two parts: a specification of what it must do, and a specification of how it must look. In the XForms these two parts are called, respectively, as the XForms Model and the XForms User Interface. With a lazy authoring, the XForms Model is little more than the boilerplate:

The action attribute contains a URL to which the form must be submitted, and the id attribute provides the unique name that we can do refer later. In the XHTML, this section of a code usually would appear in the head section of a document. The user interface do have more flexibility in how it can be written, as shown in the next section

Individual user interface elements in the XForms are called the form controls, each of which are represented by the element. Two most commonly used elements are the input and submit.

In a lazy authoring, form controls can be included anywhere in main body of a document with a attribute ref that holds a name of the form control:

Notice that each of the form control element has required the label child element, and that an submit element references the id of the submission element that has been defined earlier.