The Orbeon Forms Blog

Last week we fixed a few bugs related to state handling. Cool, you may think, but what is this state handling thingy about? The idea is in fact fairly simple: user interfaces (and this is not limited to XForms or even to the web) usually need to keep track of... More

The XML Prague conference was quite pleasant. To summarize: I arrived in the conference room at 9:03 AM on Saturday (it started at 9:00) after departing from California about 50 hours earlier. I have 9 different boarding passes for that trip (7 to get to Prague, plus 2 to get... More

XPath is designed to be used within a host language, like XSLT or XForms. Some host languages provide a tracing facility: for instance XSLT has the <xsl:message> construct. Other host languages however don’t, like XForms. For this reason the XPath trace() function can be quite useful1. trace() takes 2 arguments:... More

I posted previously on how you can use Firebug to watch events going to HTML elements. Now let’s see how you can quickly locate JavaScript code at a certain line with Firebug. Many tools have a “go to line” entry in some menu, but Firebug doesn’t. Instead, you can use... More

XPath is both simple and powerful. Since XForms uses XPath, we benefit greatly from XPath, its simplicity and power in XForms. But while most of the time XPath is simple and comprehensible, it is also a sophisticated language. Most of the time, XPath expressions will do exactly what you would... More

We have mentioned before how much we love Firebug, the Firefox extension for developers that lets you view, edit, and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Erik mentioned earlier here that the author of Firebug, Joe Hewitt, gave a presentation at Yahoo! and that you can watch or download the video... More

It’s the weekend, our time for something non-technical. But even if we are not working, we can still think about work, can’t we? At least this is what Lise Belkin did in this New York Times article: Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent. Amongst others, the article mentions a few... More

I just stumbled upon a good blog post by Ed Burnette. Without entering into the details (although they are not uninteresting), the issue described comes down to Sun voting no on a Java Community Process specification because, it seems, the techical solution (here OSGi) adopted was invented outside Sun. This... More

<img width="355 height="62" align="right" alt="XML Prague Logo" style="margin: 1em;" src="http://www.orbeon.com/download/blog/xmlprague_355x62.png"/> As blogged about earlier, we will be speaking on June 16 at XML Prague about practical applications of XML pipelines. This will be the first time I attend this conference and I am looking forward to it as I will... More

This tip shows how to nicely center HTML button content vertically. You may be familiar with the HTML button tag, which allows you to create nice HTML form buttons. For example, you can create buttons containing an icon, like this: But if you don't do anything special, depending on the... More