[whatwg] Markup for Web Forms 2.0 that still requires discussion

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 4 Jul 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>
> 1) The <datalist> element.
>
> I disapprove of this tag for two reasons. The first is that it
> depends on abusive markup for it to properly degrade in a legacy UA.

I don't really understand why you think it is abusive.

It would be abusive if the semantic of <datalist> was "list of options",
but it is "a list of options, or an alternate representation for legacy
UAs". It has a lot in common with the <object> element, in fact.


> The second reason is that you can accomplish the same thing using the
> ignore attribute without introducing a new element.

I don't see why introducing elements is worse than introcuing attributes,
in this context.


> 2) The |ignore| attribute.
>
> The |ignore| attribute is an idea I came up with but haven't gotten any
> replies on. A tag with this attribute set to "true" will not be rendered
> and any associated scripting will not run. The same is true for all
> children of the tag. As a result, the attribute turns its respective
> element and all its children into something similar to a comment, except
> that all the elements affected remain in the DOM. Changing this
> attribute to "false" (the default value) will effectively "uncomment"
> the element and all its children.

How is this different from a comment, then?

The only use it seems it could have would be to hide content from certain
UAs (which UAs, it doesn't say). Since there is no link between this
attribute and other features, it is unclear how it would be used.

-- 
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