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

[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 16:30:47 +0100, Malcolm Rowe
<malcolm-what at farside.org.uk> wrote:
> 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.

If I ever find the time...

> The benefit is twofold: immediate feedback, 

Everyone does that with script today, there's no problems with this
from a functionality perspective.

> maybe a spin-control or similar.

Have you looked at the usability?  have you considered what an author
would want in this situation, all of a sudden a spin control appearing
where the design needed something different - if this genuinely was an
option, then I think we'd need to have a whole CSS vocab as well to
style it.  My designers understand what an input box looks like, they
can allow for it in their designs, if it could be a spin/input/slider
etc. they'd be frightened at the lack of "control" all of a sudden.

> 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').

The email format is very complicated, would you really want the full
email format, comments and all being able to come back to your server?
 I've not seen an email validator in many serverside languages that
manages the full email grammar from the RFC.  the tel: definition in
the spec is full of problems I believe - users just don't know their
global format, and the UA doesn't have enough knowledge to convert
from local to global (see other post on this subject).

> 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.

In a declaritive format, if enough shipped UA's get something wrong,
it renders the whole thing useless to users - if Opera mistakenly
rejects valid email addresses in their <input type="email"> - I can't
use that input control at all in my pages.  Declaritive validation is
dangerous - it has to be implemented correctly. (at least script
validation the user can disable script, or we can provide a "no submit
it really" method in our scripts)

> I'm interested - why would anyone think your email address was invalid?

It's the + in it that's the problem many people seem to think
jim+chickents at jibbering.com is invalid, I've no idea why.

Cheers,

Jim.