[whatwg] Web forms 2, input type suggestions

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 01:31 +1000 UTC, on 2007-07-16, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> Benjamin Joffe wrote:
>> Have the following possible values for the TYPE attribute been considered
>> for the INPUT element?
>
> The major problem with all of your proposals is that you have not
> described any problem that they solve, nor provided any use cases for them.

I wrote earlier "A use case I can imagine is an authoring tool that let's users
create CSS rules. Simply clicking the wanted colour avoids the risk of
(syntactically) incorrect color values."

Other problems it would solve
- works more across browsing environments (because lack of javascript, Flash,
etc dependancies).
- provides the user with a consistent UI across sites
- much less work for authors, not having to write javascript/Flash solutions

[...]

> Here's a few sites I found that ask the user to select colours.
>
> http://www.haymespaint.com.au/haymes/colourcentre/
> http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html
> http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/
>
> I can't figure out how any of those would benefit from the new input
> type. [...]

All of these are Flash and/or javascript dependant, and thus not accessible
in every browsing environment. inpute type='color' would not have that
problem (and probably fallback gracefully in environments that cannot present
a color picker).

All provide their own unique, different UI, which is confusing to users.
Users would benefit from a UI that works the same across sites.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>