XML Unleashed

XFA Scripting Basics

Scripting on the Web has always involved the combination of two or more technologies. For example, to script a Web page, you must use HTML code to mark up the page and then use JavaScript or VBScript code to inject the scripting capabilities. There is a very clear distinction between the markup language used to describe the content of a document and the scripting language used to process that document. XFA presents an interesting twist on the scripting paradigm by using XML as the basis for a scripting language.

The XFA scripting language is implemented as an XML vocabulary consisting of elements and attributes that represent familiar programming constructs, such as conditionals, loops, and variables. XFA represents a dramatic ...