[whatwg] Suggested changes to Web Forms 2.0, 2004-07-01 working

[Jim Ley]

On Fri, 09 Jul 2004 09:00:06 -0400, Matthew Raymond
<mattraymond at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Jim Ley wrote:
>    ??? You're worried about products with non-standards-body features
> that degrade into supported standards?

Yes, because if input type=datetime then gets introduced differently
we have a legacy problem.

> > Select entries arrive on the server in say 3 entries Day Month Year.
> > To convert this into a date to get a date object for validation it's
> > simple.
> 
>    No, because as I stated before, you can't be sure that the server
> will receive a value contained in the original <select> elements sent to
> the client. As a matter of security, you must ALWAYS assume that the
> values may have been intercepted and changed, or that the client
> deliberately (or otherwise) changed the values.

How many times do I have to say THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH
VALIDATION, it is completely orthogonal to the problem.  creating a
date from Month/Year/date is considerably easier than creating one
from a single string - you must see this.  And because of regional
differences in how dates are entered, it means it's not even safe to
parse a date from a string, unless you know the format entered.
> > great give me some URI's - remember you're claiming these are common
> > and free, I don't believe it is remotely possible (hint the best ones
> > will be on Dr. John Stocktons pages)
> 
>    Why? Does Google not work on your machine?

Yep, I couldn't find a single one that remotely came close, you said
you'd just found some before that were good, but chose a woeful one
simply because it was short.

> Besides, we can always
> ask Dean Edwards to write as script like this while he's sleeping. 

As I say, I don't believe it can be done in under 10 lines, in fact
I'm incredibly confident of it.  Dean is a very good scripter, maybe
he'll rise to your challenge, but I'm willing to bet he won't be able
to do it.

>  and may not work in all implementations of
> Javascript because you assume that setDate will increment the month if
> given an out-of-range date value.

Which is an ECMAScript requirement, it's also been implemented
behaviour in all script agents I've ever seen, could you suggest one
where it doesn't work?

> > And there's no way to suggest an
> > appropriate control for the task, making desiging harder.
> 
>    I'm confused. Do you want MORE input types, or are you suggesting
> another attribute (which I believe some people on this mailing list
> would oppose).

I'm not that sure of syntax, I've described what I feel is necessary
in terms of functionality.

Jim.