[whatwg] Suggested changes to Web Forms 2.0, 2004-07-01 working
Matthew Raymond
mattraymond at earthlink.net
Thu Aug 19 11:33:35 PDT 2004
Jim Ley wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:07:17 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
>>
>>>Rather than the current situation where everything is an INPUT I don't
>>>see the difference there.
>>
>>"input" conveys that the data is a single field of data input.
>
> Which isn't the case in any of these combined controls... so I don't
> think that's a good argument.
True, but there's still the "input" semantic value there, plus the
|type| values are predefined in the markup rather than being the control
being a external plug-in.
>>If it wasn't for IE, we wouldn't have to even _consider_ abusing <object>,
>>so I don't really see your point here anyway.
>
> Wouldn't we?
I don't think it matters, because, as stated, using <object> for new
markup is abusive to <object> (because it's intended for
document-external content), it's semantically abusive and, in all the
examples I've seen, it requires duplication of information for graceful
degradation.
>>>I much prefer it to overloading INPUT.
>>
>>One possibility that has been risen (and which will be considered to WF3
>>once we have more experience with the datetime controls in WF2) is to use
>>a new element for the date/time controls. That would be preferable to the
>><object> solution.
>
> Perhaps, so why not do it now? you're suggesting we create as a
> standard something now that we know is wrong, why not do it right in
> the first place?
"Wrong" isn't the right word. What we have now may be suboptimal in
some ways, though. It would be nice to have this for instance:
<date name="date1">
<label>Day: <select id="day1" name="day1"> ... </select></label>
<label>Month: <select id="month1" name="month1"> ... </select></label>
<label>Year: <select id="year1" name="year1"> ... </select></label>
</date>
It allows webmasters to decide how they want the input to be done in
legacy browsers. This has some problems, though:
1) It has a higher learning curve.
2) It's tough to create a simple version of the above example without
either duplicating information or making the markup to complicated.
3) I read in this mailing list earlier that new attributes and attribute
values are easier in XHTML than new elements.
I'm certainly open to this, though. Feel free to pitch some ideas.
More information about the whatwg
mailing list