[whatwg] Select conformance

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Apr 1, 2006, at 11:04 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
> On Mar 30, 2006, at 06:56, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
> ...
>> I think it should be allowed. It's useful for dummy items like 
>> "Select your country" which is pre-selected in the dropdown with the 
>> list of countries.
>
> Whoa! It's even interoperably supported in Firefox and Opera.
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/test/wa10/adhoc/option-selected-disabled.html
>
> It still does not make it good UI. The case is similar to a set of 
> radio buttons with no checked button.
> ...

Actually, it's worse than that. In some themes, the only way you can 
see that a control is disabled is that its contents are greyed out -- 
its outline does not change. (This is true of buttons in the Classic 
theme in Windows, for example.) So a <select> whose selected item (and 
therefore its only visible item) was disabled would look entirely 
unusable.

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/