In June, Steven Pemberton (CWI) won a prize for his demonstration ‘A Histogram in XForms’ during the 2018 Markup UK conference at Imperial College London. Pemberton, who is the co-designer of web technology and W3C standard XForms, showed that XForms can reduce the production time and costs of an application by a factor of ten.
XForms was originally intended for handling forms on the web. However, since the first version it has been generalized to allow the description of more general applications. Nowadays, XForms is used worldwide, such as by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), the Dutch and British governments, the BBC, NHS and US Department of Motor Vehicles. In his demo, Pemberton showed how the combination of several web technologies – XHTML, CSS, SVG, and XForms – enables you to define an interactive histogram application in only a few lines of code. A live description of the demo can be found at https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/xforms/histogram.html
A salient detail is that the prize winners were determined at the conference with a voting system written in XForms.
Steven Pemberton is a member of CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) research group, which focuses on facilitating and improving the way people access media and communicate with others and with the environment. They address key problems for society and science, resulting from the dense connectivity of content, people, and devices. The group uses recognized scientific methods, following a full-stack, experimental, and human-centered approach.
More information
- Pemberton's winning XForms demo
- Steven Pemberton’s presentation
- Steven Pemberton’s homepage at CWI
- CWI’s DIS group
