[whatwg] comments on Web Forms 2.0

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Josh Aas wrote:
> 
> - You use spacing in "HTML 4" inconsistently. Sometimes there is space 
> between "HTML" and "4" and sometimes not. See the first two paragraphs 
> of the introduction.

Fixed.


> - Section 1.1: "browsers prevalent in 2004" - could be more specific 
> given that the number of decently conforming HTML 4 and DOM 
> implementations can probably be counted on one hand (Gecko, KHTML, IE, 
> Opera). This could better set the bar in terms of what is considered to 
> be an acceptable implementation.

For political reasons it has been considered wiser not to actually mention 
specific UAs. (In reality, user agents like Lynx and others were also 
taken into account, actually.)


> - Section 1.2: perhaps "strong market *demand*" instead of "need". 
> "need" is hard to justify, demand is not. And it sounds better.

Fair enough.


> - Section 1.8: digital signatures: can you include a list of patent 
> numbers you are concerned about? If you don't do that, you're 
> significantly adding to the amount of work somebody has to do to 
> consider the problem.

I am not aware of specific patent numbers.


> - Section 2.2: hidden: "An arbitrary string that is not normally 
> displayed to the user." Under what circumstances might a conforming UA 
> display hidden input to a user? The HTML 4 spec makes no mention of such 
> a circumstance.

HTML does not decide what gets shown. A stylesheet could easily say:

   input[type=hidden]:after { content: attr(value); }


> - It is not clear to me why we need a month and week extension to the 
> input element. Seems like it only complicates implementation and gives 
> people who deal with dates more rows in the matrix of things they need 
> to be able to handle. You can easily express both with date and 
> datetime. Furthermore, figuring out a date's week # is simple. Even more 
> so for months. I'd just think we should think hard before duplicating 
> avenues for the same information.

type=month: Think about entering credit card expiry dates.

type=week: This is a very frequently used data type in European industry.

While it is true that you could ask someone to use a type="datetime" 
control to state their credit card expiry date, I'd suggest it would not 
be the most obvious UI.

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