[5 January 2011]

It’s official; on Monday and Tuesday, 14 and 15 February, I’ll be teaching a two-day hands-on course on XForms in Rockville, Maryland. Thanks to Mulberry Technologies for allowing me the use of their facilities.

If you use XML seriously, particularly in a multi-person project or organization (but even if you are on your own), and you don’t use XForms, then I think you owe it to yourself to look into the possibilities XForms offers for developing special-purpose editing interfaces for your XML documents. Sometimes, you want a specialized tool to perform one particular task on your documents. Consistency in some matters is a lot easier to achieve if you go over an entire body of material checking just the one thing in all documents. Special-purpose interfaces can help here.

For example: after long drawn-out battles, your project finally agrees on how to capitalize words in section headings: sentence case or title case? It would be nice to have a specialized editor that just showed you the section headings and let you edit them. Or suppose you decide it’s time to make a pass over your entire Web site to improve accessibility. As one task, you want to ensure that all of your images have alt text. That will be easier if you have an interface in which you can pull up each Web page and have a text widget next to each image allowing you to type in the description.

If you’re interested in the course, see the course Web page. If you’re interested in email announcements of courses (and other events at Black Mesa), subscribe to our (new!) announcements list.