[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 Feedback

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> 
>    I oppose the idea of having no radio buttons in a radio group 
> initially selected. Without some sort of default, there's no way to 
> return to the initial state once you've clicked on an option. To allow 
> unselected behavior is the functional equivalent of having a default 
> option that disappears once you select something other than the default. 
> It also creates the following two problems:
> 
> 1) If you have to worry about options not being selected, you have to 
> test to see if nothing was selected. In a strict security sense, the 
> server should be checking anyway, but in practice this can trip up a lot 
> of webmasters.
> 
> 2) If the user fails to select an option from the radio group, is this a 
> choice the user made, or did they fail to select an option by accident 
> (by forgetting to select and option, paging past the radio group, et 
> cetera)?

In theory, I agree with you. However, UAs can't do what you ask for. 
Whenever a vendor has tried implementing this, they have gotten swamped 
with requests to change it back to the IE-compatible behaviour. Sites 
depend on this behaviour, and break without it.

This is one of those cases where our hands are tied by legacy content.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'