[whatwg] [Web Forms 2.0] Last minute suggestion - The <format> element.

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 11:26:15 +0000, Jim Ley <jim.ley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 02:07:49 +0100, Olav Junker Kjær <olav at olav.dk> wrote:
> > This defeats the idea that the datetime control should be localized and
> > feel native.
> 
> feel native ?!?!?!   The majority of Web UI features don't feel
> native, Mozilla and Opera use non-native controls (sensible approach
> to develop multi-platform, but it means they don't follow native
> conventions often)

Premature send here, sorry...

I understood the idea of form controls was consistency, not native
control, if it is native control (which I'd much prefer, as I find it
very hard to learn new UI's) then I think they'll be huge difficulty
in implementing it, as only Safari has really easy access to native
controls of IE+script, Opera, Mozilla etc.

> > By constraining the
> > date control to follow a simple format string, a lot of UI power is
> > lost. (Btw. the point of hiding the hint for WF2 compliant browsers is
> > lost if WF2 users should enter data in the exact same format.)

but "UI Power" isn't always the only important thing - ease of data
entry, which is I think the main point of Matthew here, is such that
forcing the format is useful - of course you don't need to use the
input type="date" in this scenario, (do you in any?) but it is an
important usecase, I've yet to see a date control on any platform that
is as fast to enter a date as an <input type="text"> - of course
that's only relevant if you know the date to input, lots of the time
you don't, which is why we have the richer controls because they
provide information.

> > But I think its a good idea to be able to specify the exact submission
> > format, since this will make adoption and backwards compatibility easier.

Indeed, and picking a format string vocab shouldn't be hard, there's
lots of prior art.

Jim.