[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 patterns...

[Jim Ley]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 22:18:09 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> I believe that most people using this feature will actually be exposed to
> regexps for the first time with this feature.

That's very unlikely, and if it is then they'll need good tutorials on
the subject, none of which talk about implied ^/$.  If they genuinely
are new, then this feature is a bad idea, regular expressions are not
trivial to get right, and simple testing isn't always enough.

> Could you give a realistic example of where that could be a problem?

The obvious example is leading and trailing whitespace, this is almost
universally accepted and stripped, having to force \s* \s* in the
pattern for all these cases is a pain.  Together with the lack of
consistency with those of us who already have regular expressions in
our validation workflow.

Jim.