[whatwg] input type="hidden" and validation

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:41:37 +0200, Oldřich Vetešník <vetesnik at mrmil.cz>  
wrote:
> I'd like to throw a question out here, please don't shoot me if it's  
> been already answered, I'm a full-time coder and don't have an internet  
> at home so I can't make any deep researches in your archives.
>
> Q: Is it possible that hidden inputs don't have to be in a semantic tag?  
> That is it passes the validation test without showing this error up:
> line 20 column 32 - Error: document type does not allow element "input"  
> here; missing one of "p", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "div",  
> "pre", "address", "fieldset", "ins", "del" start-tag
>
> It's because hidden inputs aren't meant to be shown to the front-end  
> user so it doesn't mean if it's not covered in a semantic tag. Sometimes  
> it's O.K., you have a form with a few fieldsets so you can put it in  
> one, but sometimes it's rather stupid having to do <div><input  
> type="hidden" name="somename" value="somevalue" /></div> just to silence  
> the validator.

You can test this with http://validator.nu/ which already validates HTML5.  
You can basically insert <input type=hidden> (and other <input> types)  
virtually anywhere except directly inside <table>, <ol> and elements with  
similar special models. Does that help?


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>