[whatwg] Introducing new elements is expensive

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Sun Mar 20 18:29:06 PST 2005


On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> 
> For <textarea>, if you put in HTML content inside the element, it treats 
> the contents as PCDATA, so the user will see HTML markup inside a 
> multiline textbox.

If he's lucky. That kind of document is invalid HTML4 and is asking for 
all kinds of trouble (what if </textarea> appears in the stream?).


> That is not the case with <output> in a legacy user agent. Any HTML 
> contents will display as HTML in a legacy UA. Yet if we assume the 
> <textarea> model for <output>, WF2 UAs will display the underlying 
> markup as text instead of rendering it. So, right off the bat, we have a 
> difference in how the contents of <output> are rendered between legacy 
> and WF2 user agents.

Elements inside <output> are rendered as elements, with all that that 
implies; there is no special parsing.


> Since we can't avoid a difference in rendering unless we artificially 
> enforce a no-markup-inside-<output> rule, what does it hurt to simply 
> have a |value| attribute to set the .defaultvalue directly?

The two things are separate. What's the use case for value=""?

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



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