[whatwg] Textarea Wishlist

[James Graham]

James Graham wrote:

> I was having thoughts about a somewhat similar feature - the ability to 
> specify a input 'language' for a text-area 

Thnking a little more, I think that the first partt of this idea alone 
(i.e. an attribute to specify the data type expected in a text area) 
would be useful enough to implement alone. This would allow browsers to 
implement syntax highlighting, check for XML well-formedness and provide 
access to helper applications relevant to the data type.

So something that would roughly work: Add an optional dataformat (better 
name?) attribute that takes a URI. For XML formats, this will typically 
be the namespace of the format, for other formats it must simply be 
globally unique. Additionally, specify a set of string -> URI mappings 
for common formats such  as HTML, XHTML and others so they may be 
identified by the shorter string (which must not be a valid URI) rather 
than the long URI. The behavior of the UA in response to the presence of 
the attribute is not specified.

-- 
"If anybody ever tells you that you’re using the language incorrectly, 
just yell 'prescriptive grammarian!' at the top of your voice and all 
the linguists in the building will run over and surround the guy... and 
then they’ll rough him up"