[whatwg] Re: FormImplementation interface

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
> >
> > But in any case, I've now removed the entire FormImplementation 
> > interface, in favour of XMLHttpRequest in the Web Apps draft now. 
> > (There wasn't anything that it could do which XMLHttpRequest couldn't 
> > do better, except that it was one call, and we can always define a 
> > wrapper for XMLHttpRequest later if required.)
> 
> I wonder if it would be useful with a somewhat higher level interface 
> for posting data without worring about encoding or transport. The 
> interface could take a collection of (name, value) pairs as input and 
> would present the response in the same way, if the server returned xml 
> formdata or something similar.

Yeah, that was my thinking behind the original API. I don't know whether 
it is worth adding an extension to XMLHttpRequest to do this though.


> This might be useful for issues with complex overlapping forms, like the case
> with postcode or partnumber lookup as part of a larger form.

Well, this is somewhat possible in WF2 already (although I need to make 
the form="" attribute take more than one value).


> This would allow much freedom in constructing forms orthogonal to the 
> document structure. It could also be used for constructing forms where 
> the controls are not actual input controls but some other custom dhtml. 
> (It could even be used as a limited messaging or RPC client.)

True.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'