[whatwg] native styling for search input boxes

[Kristof Zelechovski]

This amounts to saying that while it is not clear that Safari will actually
benefit from this innovation, other browsers probably can, albeit in a
limited way.  Good point.
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis [mailto:bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:29 AM
To: Kristof Zelechovski
Cc: 'Maciej Stachowiak'; 'Nils Dagsson Moskopp'; 'whatwg'
Subject: Re: [whatwg] native styling for search input boxes

Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
> I hoped to see an example of an actual semantic improvement of introducing
> INPUT[type=SEARCH].  Maciej described a conceptual improvement for the
ideal
> world; in the real world, the developers will have to use the heuristics
> anyway because there are search fields in the wild not marked as such and
> most of them will remain that way of course.

If HTML5 assumes user agents should rely on heuristics to detect Search 
fields, it should specify those heuristics (rather than forcing 
user-agents to reverse engineer them). Do you have an algorithm you 
would like to propose?

When it triggers a different interface and functionality in popular 
browsers, explicit markup is unlikely to be accidental and relying on 
explicit markup is preferable to heuristics alone. Hence the existence 
of semantic markup (heading elements, microformats, etc.).

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis