[whatwg] Re: several messages

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>>
>> My point being that the hiding behaviour is almost "error handling"
>> behaviour rather than any important part of the element's semantics.
>>
>> And of course you _can_ just use a repetition template if you want, so
>> long as it contains the <select> element that your list="" attribute
>> points to. :-)
>
> If including markup in <datalist> is a matter of "error handling",
> then isn't it just as inappropriate to include legacy markup in it as it
> is to include legacy markup in a repetition template?

Well, I said "almost". It is a secondary effect.


>>>> Why? Duplication seems error prone at best.
>>>
>>> It's a copy-paste, so it's less error prone than forgetting to put in
>>> a </datalist> tag. Worst case scenario is that the webmaster does a
>>> lot of indenting...
>>
>> No, worse case scenario is that the author, when maintaining his site,
>> only updates one of them, and doesn't notice because he didn't test it
>> in legacy UAs.
>
> I fail to see how that is worse than having half your form missing
> because you forgot the </datalist> tag.

It's worse because it is much harder to spot. Say you have a country list.
When you update the country list to take into account the latest wars, it
is easy to only update one of the lists, and very hard to spot the
mistake.

On the other hand, forgetting to close the <datalist> will be immediately
obvious in most cases. It would also be caught by syntax checking
software.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'