[whatwg] more comments to Webforms 2.0 Call For Comments

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Sat Aug 21 17:23:42 PDT 2004


On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
> 
> 2.3 "User agents implementing this specification must select the initial 
> option element of a single-select select element with no 
> otherwise-selected items."
> 
> But often you would want the user to explicitly select an option. (The 
> same reason you might want a radio group with no default selection: you 
> want to make sure the use have made a conscious descicion to choose the 
> selected option). Often the first option then is something like "Select 
> country" or something like that which in itself is not a valid 
> selection.

The text you quote is simply describing what existing Web browsers 
actually do. There's not much point making the spec say something that 
nobody implements, since so many sites no depend on their behaviour that 
browsers could never really change it.


> I propose that the first option could be marked as "notanoption" or 
> something like that, and if this option is selected, the control is not 
> successful. If the "required" attribute is sat, the select will not be 
> valid. (Right now, "required" does not apply to select-elements).

An interesting idea. I think we should consider this for Web Forms 3.0.


> With radiobuttons it is possible that not all buttons in a group has the 
> same value for the required attribute. I assume that a selection is 
> reguired if just one control in the group has the required attribute.

Effectively, yes. Basically each control is evaluated separately, but 
required="" on a radio button is satisfied if just one of the controls in 
the group is checked.


> 1.6 document must use the following doctype...
> Does that mean that a UA must NOT apply the semantics and functionality of the
> WF2 spec, if the document doesnt have that doctype?

No, why would you think that?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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