Avoiding Syntactic Violations in Forms-XML

So far, user interfaces for XML data (documents) have been typically constructed from scratch for specific XML vocabularies and applications. Forms-XML is a generic interactive component that generates form-based user interfaces for XML vocabularies. It can be considered as an unusual XML editor that avoids, instead of detects, syntactic violations. This paper covers the model and algorithms Forms-XML adopts that always keep a working document compliant with a given XML schema. The approach gains the following benefits: First, by avoiding syntactic violations altogether, Forms-XML can free the user from any syntactic concerns. Second, the system can generate elements and element slots in the process of document construction, which serve as prominent guides to the user to produce valid documents. Third, the simple editing process Forms-XML supports enables the generation of its simple form-based user interface.