[whatwg] <input type="text" accept="">

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, L. David Baron wrote:
> 
> The original use case, as I understand it, was roughly "authors want to
> disable spell checking on some textareas".

That, and enable it on input fields. Similarly, there is a desire to 
indicate that certain textareas should have spell-checking enabled but 
with an expanded vocabulary that also allows HTML tags (or that disables 
the spell-checking, if the UA doesn't know how to do that).

Looking forwards, there have also been multiple requests to be able to 
tell the UA that the contents of the field should be syntax-highlighted 
according to the rules of various languages (typically HTML or XML, and
sometimes various programming languages).


> Is the reason that they want to disable spellchecking only that the 
> contents are not "text/plain"?  I doubt it.  Doing what you propose, 
> especially if it is extended to other features, will just encourage 
> authors to use incorrect MIME types to get particular side-effects in 
> particular user agents.
>
> It seems more likely to be that the textarea is expected to contain a 
> particular type of text, such as abbreviations or some form of code. The 
> content is unlikely to have an assigned MIME type. I suppose one could 
> be made up, but that would presumably disable everything a UA did on the 
> basis of the contents, which wouldn't necessarily be appropriate.

There is certainly that possibility; indeed one of the use cases I've 
heard mentioned is "disable spell checking because the text field contains 
a list of e-mail addresses", which has no MIME type.

Given that requiring a new flag per feature is not an option (as, as 
mentioned before, it would require a central authority to add these 
features, slowing the introduction of new features and discouraging 
experimentation), what solution would you propose instead?

I don't see a better solution. I'm certainly open to better solutions if 
there are any.

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