Not so long ago, font tags (which are evil) provided a web designer’s only means of formatting an HTML document’s text for presentation within web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer™, Opera™ or Mozilla Firefox.
The trouble with font tags was that they were not only notoriously unreliable for presenting any given piece of information in the way initially intended by its author; they also bloated file sizes to almost insupportable proportions. In fact, even the text size setting of a browser could make a page’s content overlap or
An old saying goes: “There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types and those who don’t.” I am definitely in the former group. For example, I might say there are two types of people: those who read Web pages and those who create them. Of course, some of us do both, but the vast majority of the Web-using public doesn’t know or care about the messy underpinnings of HTML, Web servers, browser compatibility issues, and all the rest. They care about just one thing: the information on the page. If a page loads too slowly, if the
Forms are for collecting data, so it's not surprising that the most important concept in XForms is "instance data", an internal representation of the data mapped to the familiar "form controls". Instance data is based on XML and defined in terms of XPath's internal tree representation and processing of XML.
It might seem strange at first to associate XPath and XForms. XPath is best known as the common layer between XSLT and XPointer, not as a foundation for web forms. As XForms evolved, however, it became apparent that forms needed greater structure