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

[Jim Ley]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:02:08 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> > That a datetime control degrades into something usable, I've explained
> > it lots of time in this thread.
> 
> Oh, you're still only requesting that. Ok. I think we have explained lots
> of times in this thread why we think that's already available, and better
> than the few other proposed syntaxes that I've seen which would have more
> complete possibilities for fallback.

Could you list these enhanced proposed syntaxes again?  

> >> It really isn't. It's just a bunch of pretty simple regexps and some
> >> simple maths.
> >
> > 04/07/2004
> > 4th July 04
> > 7/4/04
> > 2004-7-4
> > 4/7/4
> > 1.091574000e+12
> >
> > Massaging all of those (well perhaps not the last) into the date
> > intended by the user, is not simple, it's a lot more complicated than,
> > just taking the date/month/year from the 3 input controls on most
> > international forms today.
> 
> It's not trivial, sure. But it's still pretty simple.

Point me to a library then... any language...

> > No, it's not - that may be the common case for when you first enter a
> > form, but even those forms upon an invalid response in it will
> > repopulate the form with the invalid data.  This makes the approach
> > unworkable for me, as after a validation failure I cannot leave the
> > user value in there.  Quite apart from it failing in all the other
> > cases where authors wish to set up a value.
> 
> I maintain that it _is_ the common case. In the 50 or so pages with forms
> that I looked at yesterday, only about 2 had an initial value.

You appear to be confusing my point - common here, I'm obviously very
poor at getting them across.

Upon submission of a form, that results in a validation error, or
other reason to return to the page (perhaps a "choose a new
destination on a flight map") develepors populate the form with the
previous entry - this is the initial value problem, it does not mean
that on first entry pages necessarily have a default  value.

> Yes, I have. Just check if "input.type" is equal to "datetime" (or
> whatever type you are checking for).

I've already demonstrated UA's that do not do this the last time you
suggested it as the solution.  Please try again...

> > Why bother, when we already have an HTML 4 compatible way of achieving
> > this (OBJECT) which is only being rejected not because it doesn't
> > degrade on IE, but because it does!  That really seems a ridiculous
> > reason to me.
> 
> The idea is to implement these features in IE. That's a requirement.

I understood the requirement to be degradeable in downlevel browsers
including the ability to provide more enhanced fallback of the new
features, via both browser plugins and scripting in UA's such as
Internet explorer.

What I did not understand it to mean, is that the implementation of
the features in IE (what does that mean by the way, which versions
platforms etc.  Could you clarify the design goals, if they're not
what my first paragraph gives) were dependant on a particular
methodology.

Cheers,

Jim.