Microsoft InfoPath

Microsoft Office InfoPath is a software application for designing, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms containing structured data. According to one of its inventors, a key architectural design decision was "to adhere to the XML paradigm of separating the data in a document from the formatting." Thus the product features a WYSIWYG form design area in which the various controls (dropdowns, text boxes, etc.) are bound to data fields represented separately as a hierarchical tree view of folders and data fields. A patent filed in 2000 by Adriana Neagu, Jean Paoli and others describes the technology as "authoring XML using DHTML views and XSLT." Microsoft initially released InfoPath as part of Microsoft Office 2003 family....