[whatwg] pattern attribute
Max Romantschuk
max at provico.fi
Mon Aug 23 05:03:30 PDT 2004
Ian Hickson wrote:
> The silent dropping of errors was one of the main catalysts to the success
> of the Web, IMHO.
>
> One of WHATWG's design principles is based on this:
>
> # Users should not be exposed to authoring errors
> #
> # Specifications must specify exact error recovery behaviour for each
> # possible error scenario. Error handling should for the most part be
> # defined in terms of graceful error recovery (as in CSS), rather than
> # obvious and catastrophic failure (as in XML).
> -- http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html
I hate to admit it, but you have a very good point. I guess I'm put off
by the idea due to being a programmer at heart ;)
> I'm open to suggestions; what do you think should happen with invalid
> pattern attributes? Bear in mind the design principle mentioned above;
> end users shouldn't be exposed to these errors.
Perhaps there should be a debugging attribute which could be added to a
form during development? User agents which supported the attribute could
then trigger a suitable error during form validation and abort
submission as defined in the current spec [1]. This way there would be a
simple way for authors to check their regexps without having to revert
to a bunch of additional tools.
This is just a quick thought though. I realize the risk of authors
leaving the debugging attribute in place, so that may be a reason not to
even consider this. Another option would be for WF2 to define a special
debugging mode which could be activated in the user agent.
In any case, I feel that some kind of mechanism for checking the
regexp's syntax would be very beneficial.
.max
[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#form-submission
--
Max Romantschuk
http://max.nma.fi/
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