[whatwg] Changing punctuation value of input element in telephone state

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2010, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
> On 04/07/2010 12:37 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Tue, 6 Apr 2010, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
> >>
> >> For input element in telephone state [1] specs say "User agents may 
> >> change the punctuation of values that the user enters." I do not really 
> >> get it. What is the idea ?
> > 
> > For example, if I enter "1 650 253-0000", the user agent is allowed to 
> > change that to "+1 (650) 253 0000" or "16502530000" or "+1 (650) 
> > 253-0000". This is because such reformatting is common practice in 
> > telephone number entry fields.
> 
> I understand this is common but as the UA is "allowed to" behave a
> certain way, it is going to be really hard for the webpages to check the
> telephone numbers validity. With the example you gave, for one entry,
> three different values have been generated.
> In my opinion, this is the contrary of the spirit of no type-mismatch
> constraint validation.

Well the alternative is to not have the user agent change the value at 
all, in which case you still have to do server-side canonicalisation, so I 
don't think it really makes any difference.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'