[whatwg] Suggestion: Implementation of Tabbed Forms

[Lachlan Hunt]

Matthew Raymond wrote:

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

   LOL! Treating my messages like trash... oh well, no big deal.


>>   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.

   I was thinking that there are different cases where mutually 
exclusive sections are used.  For example:
1. In wizard interfaces where the user must sequentially step through
    each, usually with Next and Back buttons.
    This could use something like <sequential> for the container.

eg.
<sequential>
	<exclusive>...</exclusive>
	<exclusive>...</exclusive>
</sequential>

   (my preference is for <exclusive>, rather than <mxsection>, simply 
becuase I like actual words, rather than abbreviations where possible, 
and when there's no benefit of either being shorter to type)

2. In options/properties dialogs, or other tabbed interfaces where the
    user can view them in any order, usually with tabs or buttons.
    This could use something like <concurrent> for the container.
eg.
<concurrent>
	<exclusive>...</exclusive>
	<exclusive>...</exclusive>
</concurrent>

   The element names could probably be better, expesially <concurrent>. 
  I wanted an antonym for sequential, and that was the most appropriate 
I could find with my limited research.

>    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, effectivly they degrade to unstyled <div> or <span> elements 
(depending on whether it defaults to block or inline styling — I'd 
assume inline, which is effectivly no style at all, but I could be 
wrong)  Either way, I don't see that as a real problem.  User agnets 
with styles disabled or unsupporeted handle <div> and <span> just fine, 
and the content is completey useable (for accessible documents, where 
semantic markup has been used properly).

-- 
Lachlan Hunt

http://www.lachy.id.au/
lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au