[whatwg] Repetition model changes

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>
>     I was just thinking about something. Say you have a website where
> people can register their team for a competition. There have to be at
> least five team members in the team to register, but they can have as
> many as ten members on the team. The form they fill out requests the
> name of each person. Under the current spec, you'd have the following:
>
> [...]
>
>     There's just one problem. The form is supposed to start out with
> five elements, but on a non-WF2 UA, you'd only see one. As a result, the
> server would probably initially populate the table with at least four
> entries...
>
> [...]
>
>     Note that I left off repeat-start because the default value is one.
> So why exactly do we need repeat-start???

Because on the long run, people may want to either only support WF2 UAs
(much the same way as, e.g., GMail only supports UAs that do
XmlHttpRequest) or may wish to only provide basic functionality to legacy
clients, with WF2 clients having a better experience.


>     Can someone explain to me why what scenario results in [id] being a
> problem. I can't seem to find an example in the mailing list.

Say you have a template that is being auto-generated, with the
auto-generation code taking some user-specified text and using it in, say,
a |title| attribute:

    <div repeat="template" id="x1">
     <p title="${user_tooltip}">
      ...

Now is ${user_tooltip} contains [x1], the tooltip will end up having some
strange numbers replacing it where the "[x1]" string was expected.

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