[whatwg] Suggestion: Implementation of Tabbed Forms

[Matthew Raymond]

    I would have replied sooner, but my junk mail filtering hid the 
message from me.

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>   Maybe something like <exclusive> and <mxsection> (Mutually eXclusive 
> section).  I think we actually need two elements: One as a container for 
> all the sections, and another to represent 1 section. eg. in this format 
> (not necessarily with these element names):
> <mxsection>
>     <exclusive><label>Exclusive Section 1</label>...</exclusive>
>     <exclusive><label>Exclusive Section 2</label>...</exclusive>
> </mxsection>

    I think the following would be a little bit better:

<mxsections>
   <mxsection><label>Exclusive Section 1</label>...</mxsection>
   <mxsection><label>Exclusive Section 2</label>...</mxsection>
</mxsections>

    Each element you had labeled "exclusive" is really a mutually 
exclusive section in and of itself, where as <mxsection> in your example 
was a section that CONTAINED mutually exclusive section.

>   But perhaps the container element could be a number of different 
> elements, depending on the context of what the mutually exclusive 
> sections represent.

    If you can come up with a compelling use case for that, then I'd 
love to hear it. Otherwise, is seems like a lot of effort for little gain.

>>    The difference is that, in IE without such scripting support, the 
>> date control degrades into a text input, so there is at very least a 
>> control there to input the date into. With elements that IE doesn't 
>> recognize, IE with scripting disables would render NOTHING, regardless 
>> of what you put into CSS.
> 
>   That's not an issue for me, since these elements are only there to 
> structure the content into exclusive sections, it shouldn't affect the 
> usability of the document in any way, because, as far as I'm concerned, 
> a well written document should be able to be understood, perhaps not as 
> easily, regardless of the style applied.

    The problem here that you're ignoring is that in the most common web 
browser in the world doesn't even allow styling for these new elements, 
which means they degrade into nothing but their child contents. In fact, 
the opening and closing tags will be treated as separate, stand-alone 
elements, so the DOM will have all their contents as siblings rather 
than children.

    So, effectively, all new elements in Web Apps 1.0 are for 
WA1-compliant UAs only. Then again, most of the content in Web Apps 1.0 
may be new elements. Perhaps your above solution, then, would be a valid 
entry. It depends on whether we want most of the Web Apps 1.0 content to 
degrade. I'll need to look over the current WA1 draft.