[whatwg] pattern attribute

[Wrigley, Ave]

I have a couple of questions about the pattern attribute (apologies if
this has been discussed at length already - couldn't find anything in
the list archive).

1. What is the motivation behind the implicit ^ and $ (start and end of
string metacharacters)? I appreciate that in a lot of cases it makes it
easier for people to implicitly match the whole string, but (as is
mentioned in a sidebar) it make it potentially much more complex for
people who want to match substrings (especially where newlines are
possible). Would it be better just to comply with the ECMA-262 spec?

2. Also (not wishing to compicate things too much!) did you consider
supporting regex modifiers (I guess case insensitivity would be
particularly useful)?

3. Finally, is it necessary to have an ERROR_ for invalid regexes

I guess the real point of 1 is consistency, and the expectation that the
input control will do what you expect. For example - I would expect that
if I already have a validator implemented in javascript, I should be
able to use the same regex pattern that I am using to validate an imput
field in the script.

Ave.

Ave Wrigley
Head of New Media Technology, ITN
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