[whatwg] Text areas with pattern attributes?

[Max Romantschuk]

Mike Shaver wrote:
> It's also pretty common to enter multiple email addresses or tracking
> numbers or URLs one-per-line for batch operations on sites, and they
> would benefit from having client-side validation of such patterns.

I also believe that it would be beneficial to have an option to 
regex-validate a text area in cases like this.

One might argue that a case like this is served by having an AJAX 
interface with multiple inputs, but in my experience a lot of real world 
office work involves "the worlds most used database", the spreadsheet.

It's not far fetched to imagine copy-pasting a bunch of data from a 
spreadsheet column into a textarea, in which case it would make sense to 
be able to have client side validation for a given pattern repeated n 
times with newlines in between.

I really don't see a case for not allowing pattern for a textarea. The 
implementation side should not be that different from the same attribute 
on a text input? Except for the client side overhead of parsing a large 
amount of data against a regex, what would be the drawbacks on having 
pattern on textareas?

.max

-- 
        Max Romantschuk
        max at romantschuk.fi
http://max.romantschuk.fi/