[whatwg] Re: Forming Opinions

[Ian Hickson]

(In response to
   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/20/deviant.html
   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/27/deviant.html
   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/05/04/deviant.html
   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/05/11/deviant.html
...)

First of all, thanks for your comments!

I've skipped past the less concrete remarks, since they mostly relate to 
general issues of what direction Web browsers should be going in, whereas 
the WHATWG charter starts off with an assumption as to what direction they 
should go in, letting other directions be discussed and used in parallel.


You wrote:
>
> Section 2 starts off saying "At the heart of any form lies the form 
> controls", which seems like a poor choice of words. 

Agreed. Removed.


> Another useful resource is description of common features that are 
> widely implemented in IE and other browsers, but not formally documented 
> as a standard anywhere. In this camp is the autocomplete attribute. 
> There are likely others as well, but the arrangement of the document 
> makes it difficult to see which features fall into this category.

True. I have made a note to add an appendix in future specs that detail 
which parts are known to have been widely implemented already.


> Based on that experience, I've concluded that [the repetition] section 
> doesn't live up to one of the primary requirements of WF2: that it 
> should provide familiar ground for existing developers.

I agree. Unfortunately we haven't really seen a better proposal. 
Suggestions welcome! (The XForms model is unfortunately not really an 
option here for several reasons; in the first place it is not backwards 
compatible, not even to the small extent that the WF2 model is, and in the 
second place it is poorly defined in terms of the DOM, which makes it hard 
to integrate into the general HTML forms and CSS styling model.)

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