[whatwg] Web forms 2, input type suggestions

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 14 Jul 2007, Martin Atkins wrote:
> Benjamin Joffe wrote:
> > 
> > type="address"
> > Indicates that the input should represent an address, the user agent may aid
> > by displaying data from a GPS or use an online map etc.
> 
> I have a little more trouble with this idea, for a number of reasons:
>  * Address formats vary from region to region.
>  * Sites usually want items like the postal code, state, county or town
> separated from the street address for various reasons. This is not catered for
> by your proposal.
>  * To do anything special for this field beyond just displaying a big text box
> some sort of external data source is required, but it is not at all obvious
> what that data source would be or what a good UI for this field type might be.

Yeah, I don't see why type=text isn't enough here.


> > type="location"
> > Same as above but instead of sending an address string it would send
> > latitude/longitude information, this (as opposed to the above) would send a
> > well-formed string.
> > 
> > Perhaps coordinates/geocoordinates or something else would be a more
> > suitable name for the latter. 
> 
> I have similar reservations about this one, but at least there is a more 
> obvious UI: mobile devices with built in GPS recievers could concievably 
> provide an option to fill in the current coordinates.
> 
> However, I'm not sure that submitting geographic coordinates is a common 
> enough case to warrant an input type of its own. Part of me wants to 
> generalize it to be type="2dvector" and type="3dvector", which can then 
> represent any 2D or 3D coordinates. I'm not really sure what a UA would 
> do to such a field that would be any more useful than two or three 
> type="text" elements, though.

We used to have type=location, long ago. It was removed due to the 
problems involved in providing this information.

Now that the W3C is working on a Geolocation API, I think we should defer 
this for now and only if there is still a clear need for this in a few 
years should we reconsider it.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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