[whatwg] Text areas with pattern attributes?

[Max Romantschuk]

Smylers wrote:
> The point is to have cases specifically _for_ it -- not adding
> everything for which there isn't a reason against.
> 
> If <textarea pattern=...> wouldn't in practice be used by authors then
> there's no point in adding it.  If it would be used then it should be
> trivial to show some places where it would be used.

I think it's important not to forget that a great deal of web 
applications are internal applications not exposed to the Internet. In 
an environment like that performance issues with evaluating regexps 
against a large body of text are less of an issue, since the 
workstations used are under the control of the organization the 
application is internal to.

Personally I just feel that a unified interface is more valuable than 
"holding author's hands" and preventing them from making unwise design 
choices. If an input field used with the pattern attribute for inputting 
a single value needs to be changed to a multi-line textarea with the 
same pattern repeated not having pattern for textareas would mean a 
great deal of extra work for authors.

Granted, my judgement is clouded... I've always felt that the separation 
of <input type="text"> and <textarea> seemed unnatural. I guess I'm just 
personally against widening the gap when the difference from a user's 
perspective is that one is single-line and the other multi-line. :)

.max

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