"I think it'll be PDF that's more the solution for communicating across the firewall, and that's really a matter of mindshare," Schmelzer said. "When a company thinks about distributing documents outside their firewall, they don't think about (Microsoft) Word; they focus on PDF."
"Acrobat (Adobe's family of PDF authoring tools) has that mental leadership," Schmelzer said, "and it has the perception of being good at retaining formatting wherever the document goes, which is really important in forms -- everything has to be in the right place."
The middle ground
Between software giants Microsoft and Adobe are many smaller companies offering e-forms packages that use XML and usually require nothing more than a Web browser as the interface for data input.
Cardiff Software, which started in the early 1990s by selling server-based software for managing e-forms, sells Liquid Office, an application that uses standards such as Java and XML to parse online forms for consumption by back-end software.
"Our business model is predicated on the servers that automate the business processes behind the forms," chief executive Clerke said. "We let the user decide what format may work best for them for a given business process."
Cardiff plans to support InfoPath and already works extensively with PDF. Clerke expects Cardiff to provide some of the server capability missing in both companies' e-forms approaches. "We're embracing the same messages they are," he said, "but both of them are focusing on the client. Our approach is all about embracing open standards. Our view is to take a server approach and be client-agnostic."
As part of its standards approach, Cardiff is supporting XForms, a forms-based XML specification published by the W3C, the main governing body for Web-related standards. ZapThink's Schmelzer says XForms has the potential to alleviate confusion among different XML dialects supported by e-forms companies, but it will take time.
"It's XML, so theoretically anything can produce or consume it, but it's a very specific vocabulary for whatever approach you take," Schmelzer said. "XForms could help people centralise on one vocabulary, but there are very few servers now that are capable of handling XForms-submitted information. I think it'll take a few years before XForms gains any widespread attraction, just because of the processing challenges."
