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

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 13:35:40 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> So why not use OBJECT?  It would get around the abusiveness (which I
> have some sympathies with)

I fail to see how <object> would make sense here. Could you expand on your
proposal?

Note that <form> has a lot in common with <h1>, but that doesn't mean they
are equivalent and certainly doesn't mean one could be used instead of the
other.


> > > 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.
>
> Legacy UA's do a better job of dealing with new attributes, than they
> do new elements.

But in this case, we are talking about making legacy UAs _show_ the
contents. So why would this be relevant?

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