[whatwg] Re: Web Forms 2: Altenative to <select editable>

[Malcolm Rowe]

Jim Ley writes: 

> [select-editable implemented as a fieldset snipped]

It sounds like there are still some issues to work out with that solution 
(which isn't surprising). Could you try to firm it up as a more concrete 
proposal? It's an interesting idea. 

> Over client-side validation though is one of the worst problems on the
> web, for example email addresses and telephone no's., loads of people
> reject my email address in their forms, and having to replicate all
> the validation on the server anyway, I'm not sure what the real value
> is in the extra validation.

The benefit is twofold: immediate feedback, and richer controls. If we can 
declaratively mark as field as numeric, the UA can prevent the user from 
entering non-numeric data. It can also choose to present a control specific 
to numeric entry, maybe a spin-control or similar. 

I agree that over-validation is very bad, however, Ian's current spec for 
the 'email' and 'tel' types refers to the relevant normative RFC's, so I 
can't see any problems there, unless those specs are incorrect (could be 
true for the 'tel' type, I suppose, highly unlikely for 'email'). 

It's always possible that a UA might implement it's own ideas about what 
forms a valid email address, but that's a conformance problem in the UA, not 
a problem with the spec per se. 

I'm interested - why would anyone think your email address was invalid? I 
can't say I've had any problems, though some servers have a tendency to 
force the whole address to upper case, which is very annoying (and illegal). 

Regards,
Malcolm