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

[George Lund]

In message <851c8d310407170828254675a4 at mail.gmail.com>, Jim Ley 
<jim.ley at gmail.com> writes
>I've suggested an approach similar to the select combo approach
>whereby we can have more complicated degradation than just a text box,
>I've no idea why no-one else considers this, but instead tries to
>convince me that a text box is a perfectly suitable format for
>entering dates, despite the fact they've yet to come up with an
>example.

Your suggestion in ciwah was that we have

><object name=datetime classid="urn:wtfwg:datetime">
>Day:<input name=day>
>Month: <input name=month>
>Year:<input name=day>
>Time:<input name=time>
></object>

My problem with this that now we have to overload the object element for 
every extension we want to make to HTML.  Ultimately everything becomes 
an object, which isn't very "semantic".

But I do agree that the more traditional HTML-like approach would have 
been not to try to force the existing input element to do everything by 
means of the type attribute.  Perhaps a new element should have been 
made, like this:
<datetime_input name="mydatetime">
Day:<input name=day>
Month: <input name=month>
Year:<input name=day>
Time:<input name=time>
</datetime_input>

I'm not saying my choice of names is any good but maybe the idea is 
helpful?  If it was already rejected then apologies.

Personally though I would far prefer to enter dates by typing in a 
single text box - often even compared to using an actual date picker. 
But this way the page author gets to choose how they want the picker to 
degrade.

-- 
George Lund