Hopefully someone can give me a quick sanity check on this; I need to put a project together based on stuff I haven't done before and I want to avoid digging myself into a hole.
I need a web-form based application (which will be run on a simple Linux server sat in an office accessible remotely via VPN, probably PHP based).
Most of the time it will be used from PCs with direct or indirect access to that server, but sometimes (eg from a laptop with no Internet access) they'll need to fill in the form offline then submit it later. Often they'll need to do this many times between "uploads".
I plan to use XForms for this, and either submit the form directly on completion or store the form data to an XML file if that is not possible. I need to be able to reload the data to edit it if necessary (eg to correct mistakes) and ideally I also need to be able to retrieve data from the XML files for basic manipulation through JavaScript (ie so I can create a printable version of the data again without access to the server).
Aside from the lack of native support for XForms in any major browser (fixable through plugins), have I missed any major gotchas in this logic?
I'm not after someone telling me how to do it (no complaints if they do :-), I'm happy to learn it to do it, I just need to pick a direction to go in pretty urgently and I don't want to invest too much time on an option that is plain wrong as there's a very short lead time on this project. There's an existing application comprising messy Excel documents that I want to wave bye-bye to asap, but one thing in its favour is that it works fine without server access and I can't lose that.
NB: Most of what I know about XForms comes from here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformsintro1/