[whatwg] Default Radio Buttons

[dolphinling]

Petrazickis wrote:
> Matthew Raymond wrote:
> 
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>>>
>>>>   Oh, I agree that for backwards compatibility sake, we need to 
>>>> support radio groups with no initial values. However, I see little 
>>>> reason not to recommend default radio buttons in either WF2 or WA1. 
>>>> (Probably the former.)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> You mean give a suggestion to authors? The spec already says "Authors 
>>> are recommended to always have one radio button selected. Having no 
>>> radio buttons selected, or more than one in a group selected, is 
>>> considered very poor UI." but I don't know what else we can do.
>>
>>
> How about the following?
> - The last radio button marked selected in a sequence will be the only 
> one considered selected by the UA. The UA will not allow for more than 
> one radio button to be selected at a time.
> - If no radio button is marked selected, the UA will select the first 
> radio button. The UA will not allow for the absence of a selected radio 
> button.
> 

The problem with that is that there are a whole ton of pages out there 
that use the absence of a selected button as a "choice" (usually a "do 
nothing" choice) instead of properly coding their pages to include that 
choice. Forcing a selected button would break all those pages, and no UA 
can afford the backlash that would create among users.

The only thing I can think of is selecting one by default but allowing 
an unselect ability--but that would still be seen as a hassle by most of 
said users.