[whatwg] Comments on Web Forms 2.0 Working Draft

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Christian Schmidt wrote:
>>>
>>> The custom validation could be done in onchange or oninput, but that
>>> may turn out to be too often or too rare.
>
> Doing it on onchange will be to rare. If there is a CSS rule for
> :invalid, this rule should be applied as soon as the value of the
> control becomes invalid and not wait for the onchange event to be
> triggered (right?).

:invalid will apply to an element whenever it is invalid, yes.


> Doing it on oninput may turn out to be too often. Assume that I have a
> validation function that takes, say, 0.2 seconds to compute. If this
> function is called oninput, it has to be computed for each keypress and
> that makes typing slow. The UA may choose to only do the validation once
> in a while, e.g. once every x seconds, so that the :invalid rule is
> still applied, just a little delayed. Or if there are no :invalid rules,
> the UA may choose not to validate until e.g. form.validate() is called
> or control.validity is accessed.

The UA can do its own validation continuously (none of the WF2 built in
validations are particularly time consuming), and the author can do the
custom validation whenever he likes, either oninput, onchange, or using
some sort of timeout triggered by one of those events.

Isn't that enough?


> Also, onchange and oninput are not triggered by scripted changes to the
> control value. I think that an onvalidation event should be triggered by
> scripted changes, so that control.validity is always in sync with the
> actual validity of the control.

It is, apart from the custom bit, which is set when the author sets it. If
the author set the value, it's the author's responsibility to set the
validity (or, e.g., he could call changed() on the control to trigger an
event and have the validation on the event).

Generally though, it seems that the author would want to only set a
control to a valid value... seems like bad UI for script to set a value
and then later complain to the user that it isn't valid!

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'