[whatwg] Incremental rendering of forms

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> 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.

As noted below, this isn't breaking anything.


> > 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.

As noted below, this is backwards compatible.


> > 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.

Here's an example:

   http://whatwg.org/demos/multiform-01/

It seems to work fine in legacy UAs, but uses the multiple form feature 
for WF2 UAs, giving users of those UAs better experience.

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