[whatwg] Text areas with pattern attributes?

Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com
Tue Aug 25 06:24:57 PDT 2009


On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:05 AM, Anne van Kesteren<annevk at opera.com> wrote:
> Also, maxlength cannot be enforced as client-side validation requirement due to compatibility issues.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that.  You're right, that would provide
somewhat inconsistent behavior.  On the other hand, just not letting
you type any more is if anything probably better than an error
message.  I don't see why you'd ever *want* the behavior of
pattern=".{0,n}" for maxlength=n.

For that matter, it might be nice if some patterns just refused to let
you enter anything that doesn't meet the pattern -- but not all,
clearly.  E.g., "[ -~]*" to restrict to ASCII would really like to
just not let you type other characters, but that's not workable for
".{10,}" to set a minimum length.  Possibly this is too much
complication for the time being, however.


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