[whatwg] Incremental rendering of forms

[Jim Ley]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:37:08 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> Whether it is a single form or multiple forms is largely an implementation
> detail. That's rather my point.

So if it's an implementation detail, then there's no point breaking
compatibility with legacy browsers - I understood the only motivation
for breaking backwards compatibility in WHAT was if something couldn't
be done without it.

> Well, with the current Web Forms draft form controls can be members of
> multiple forms 

Yes, and you've still not addressed my issue on this not being
backwards compatible so should not be part of the WHAT-WG
specification as per the guiding principles which put backwards
compatibility as a key part.

> While the existing UAs will not submit the forms according to WF2
> semantics, it is quite possible to author forms that use these features in
> backwards-compatible ways, by having WF2 UAs submit to one script and
> legacy UAs submit to another, with the legacy UAs getting the entire page
> replaced and the new UAs getting just the new data sent and filled into
> the existing form.

No, because legacy browsers do not deal with invalid (to their idea of
HTML) in a manner that makes that possible - with sub-forms you don't
end up with one big form, but lots of little ones.

As with so many of these features, the much claimed compatibility
doesn't exist in any examples, and is based on a rather limited
experience of a minority of legacy user agents.

Jim.