[whatwg] Text areas with pattern attributes?

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Aug 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> >>
> >> Ok, addresses might not be the best example. I would imagine that 
> >> most use cases for pattern for a single line, carries over if you 
> >> want to have that single line wrap and be displayed as multiple 
> >> lines. So if you can provide the list of use cases that was used to 
> >> add pattern on single-line input and I'd be very surprised if not 
> >> most of them carries over to multi-line.
> >
> > The main use cases that were considered as far as I recall were credit 
> > card numbers and other bank numbers (we originally considered type=cc 
> > but that turned out to be more locale-specific than expected), social 
> > security numbers and other formatted serial numbers, and username 
> > fields that exclude certain characters.
> 
> So add 'multiple' on all of those and you'll have a good reason you'd 
> want them all to be able to wrap over multiple lines. I.e. ability to 
> enter multiple bank numbers, multiple social security numbers or 
> multiple usernames.

I could see an argument for <input type=text pattern=... multiple>. That's 
probably best left for a future version though.

But I don't think that's the same as multiline input.


> >> The difference between <input type=text> and <textarea> is mostly a 
> >> rendering one. One scrolls the text when it can't fit, the other 
> >> wraps. Do you really think that creates enough of a difference that 
> >> the feature set should be different?
> >
> > The feature sets are different in many other ways. This is hardly an 
> > exception. For example, <textarea> has no list="" support, cols="" 
> > works differently than size="", the default value is set differently, 
> > <textarea> doesn't support autocomplete, etc.
> 
> All of these seem like a bad idea to keep separate for multiline inputs 
> vs. single line inputs. Except for the default value which for historic 
> reasons make sense to use separate mechanisms, and cols/size which are 
> both mostly rendering differences.

It's not clear how list="" would work with <textarea>, and I'm not aware 
of any UA that does <textarea> autocomplete.

I don't necessarily think all this is how I would design this if we were 
starting from scratch, but we're not, and I don't think we should be 
making them consistent at this point without good use cases.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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