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

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
> On 07/29/2010 12:08 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> >> Other than that, the only safe alternative would be to leave the 
> >> values untouched, so the page can say what it wants, the user honor 
> >> it, and the server get it as expected; or gracefully degrade to an 
> >> error message that actually points to the user error (rather than an 
> >> error introduced by an UA trying to be out-smart the user).
> >>
> >> For sites that are ready to sanitize values from a specific locale; 
> >> but which are accessed through an UA with different settings (ie: on 
> >> a public place while abroad), the UA adding locale-specific stuff to 
> >> a phone value is very likely to render whole forms unusables.
> > 
> > Adding, yes. Changing the spacing seems harmless.
> 
> It is, unless an author adds a pattern because he/she wants the 
> telephone number in a specific format (including spacing) which is 
> suggested by the specifications. In that case, if the user can't cancel 
> UA's autoformatting, it could be really bad for user experience.
> 
> I'm just worried about that case. If you consider it's not a 
> specification problem (ie. UA should let users disable autoformatting), 
> it's ok.

Certainly the user agent should not take input that matches the pattern 
and autoformat it into a string that doens't match the pattern. But that 
seems like a quality of implementation issue, not a spec issue.

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