[whatwg] Proposal: Allow block content inside label element

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On May 9, 2007, at 10:28 PM, Křištof Želechovski wrote:
>
> The restriction on LABEL behavior is not a clarification, it is a  
> change.

Sorry, that was a poor word choice on my part. By "clarifies this" I  
meant "makes this more accurate", not "makes this more precise".

If you know of any non-contrived Web applications that are broken by  
this change, I'd be fascinated to see them.

> The browser vendor has to choose whether it is compliant with version  
> 4 or 5.  Therefore the current behavior can hardly be called a bug.

It seems to be a bug in the HTML 4 specification. The relevant  
paragraph says: "When a LABEL element receives focus, it passes the  
focus on to its associated control. See the section below on access  
keys for examples." Obviously they were thinking about access keys, and  
maybe they were thinking about voice interfaces too, but not mentioning  
them specifically so as to convey an aura of media-independence. I  
would be very surprised if they were thinking about clicking on the  
label, since no native GUI worked that way (and ten years later, still  
none do).

> Note that this change is not reported on the Wiki
> <http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Changes_from_HTML4#Changed_Elements>; I  
> did not update the content because I strongly oppose this idea.

No openly-editable wiki page can be normative.

> It seems it has strong support
> <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2004-July/ 
> thread.html#1366> - where Mr. Raymond's opinion unfortunately sank -  
> but there is a possibility to overthrow it by making it void on a  
> legal basis: The Microsoft Windows environment does not provide a  
> native LABEL control.*
> ...

That's not true. For example: <http://urlx.org/microsoft.com/7354a>

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