[whatwg] Incremental rendering of forms

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 17:41:20 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> > Could you please describe a situation where this is using a table
> > semantically correctly, rather than this being a feature due to the poor
> > state of CSS in many UA's.
> 
> Of course. Spreadsheets, fill-in receipts, expense forms, invoices,
> product catalogues, inventory forms, etc.

They all sound like a single form to me, what's the situation where
they are multiple forms in seperate rows?

> Are you proposing that the <formdata> element be changed to a
> <documentdata> element with <formdata> children which have IDs to specify
> which form the data should apply to? Or...?

The problem is not the form updating mechanism, it is the form
elements not being a member of their container.

> Yes, WHATWG provides several ways of solving this issue.

Why?  What's the reason for providing more things to implement than is
necessary, especially as one method (as we can see from your other
post with the example) is far and away superior to the other. 
Especially as the other also is not backwards compatible with any
existing UA.

> > Seen as these things will not degrade in IE6 (let alone other UA's) in
> > any case, I don't really see how this meets the WHAT-WG principles.
> 
> Which specific mechanism do you think does not degrade in a useful manner?

bare form elements not in their forms container, form elements not in
any form container etc.

> Your opinion is noted.

Which means what?  Does the WHAT-WG need to show dissent when moving
this part of the spec to the next phase etc?

> > how about just digging out the original discussion of the use case, and
> > post those.
> 
> This feature was added to Web Forms 2 months before WHATWG archives
> begin, unfortunately, so the original discussions were not archived. 

I think this is an excellent reason to re-open the issue anew, with
detailed use cases etc.  If no-one can recall the original use cases,
aren't able to come up with complete ones simply - we should simply
re-start discussion as if it was new.

Jim.