[whatwg] Publishing another Web Forms 2 Call For Comments soon

[Olav Junker Kjær]

Hallvord R M Steen wrote:
 > Regarding submitting all the changes: A specific row in the table
 > could be submitted to a new window or another frame, or be submitted
 > without updating the page, and you could keep making other changes.

Good point. With replace=data it definitely makes sense to update one 
row at a time. This is how database clients often work, you edit one row 
at a time and when focus leaves the row, the entire row is updated in 
the background. The WA1 datagrid should support something like this.

The real problem is that there is no way to declare that all form 
controls in a single table row is part of the same dataset and should be 
submitted (and updated) as a unit, since HTML does not allow TR elements 
to be contained directly by a FORM. This is a serious problem, since 
tabular data which you want to edit "row by row" is exactly the type of 
data TABLE was intended for.

(Somebody pointed out that this is actually possible in current 
browsers, but apparently this is supported only for the sake of 
backwards compatibility and involves scary hacks and shouldn't be relied 
on.)

Anyway, It doesn't seem like the obvious solution to redefine the 
relationship between forms and form fields from simple containment to be 
many-to-many and orthogonal to document structure.

But maybe its just because I understand the semantics of the form 
element incorrectly? I think of a form as as a grouping of related input 
fields which is edited by the user as a whole. By this understanding, it 
makes sense to have the form defined by containment. OTOH, if the form 
element is thought of more like the data model in XForms, then it makes 
sense to define the FORM separately from the input widgets, and allow 
widgets to bind to several data models. I dont think this fits too well 
with how forms usually are thought of in HTML, though.

Regards
Olav Junker Kjær