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

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
> 
> I suspect that I'm beating a dead horse or something here, but for what 
> its worth, I dont find these two use cases entirely convincing.
> 
> If you want to edit tabular data, you would either want a single row to 
> be editable at a time, in which case you need only one form, or you 
> would want all rows to be editable at the same time, in which case you 
> still only need one form, since you want to be able to submit all the 
> changes.

I have seen, and used, forms where the author had one form per row, 
hacked using <form> elements in invalid places. There are cases where that 
is the UI that people want.


> The other use case is quite realistic though, and shows a genuine need 
> for a more flexible form model. However the solution of letting a field 
> be part of several forms at the same time does not really solve the 
> problem. If there are no validation constraints, it's much easier to 
> just have a different action attribute on the "lookup" buttons. But if 
> there are validation constraints on the fields, neither solution works.

I agree it's not perfect.


> For example, the product-code field would typically be required with 
> respect to the main form, but optional with respect to the lookup form, 
> but the reverse might be the case with the product-name field.

Yeah, I've considered doing things like:

   required="form1 form2"

...to mean that the field was required for those particular forms. But I 
don't really like that idea. I'm not sure what else to do (short of JS to 
change the requiredness, which is what XForms effectively does).

I agree that form="" is not the perfect solution. But it does address use 
cases that people have asked for, and it is reasonably simple. If we want 
to get rid of it, we have to find something better, and so far I haven't 
seen or come up with any better proposals, unfortunately.

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