[whatwg] input element list attribute and filtering suggestions

[Jonas Sicking]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
>>
>> The list attribute on input elements let the author specify a list
>> of pre-defined suggestions via the datalist element (each option of the
>> datalist is a suggestion). It looks like the idea is to have all the
>> suggestions showing like a combobox which is more or less confirmed by
>> Hixie. [http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9785]
>>
>> However, it sounds like having a static combobox would only fulfill some
>> use cases (ie. when a very small set of suggestions is defined). In most
>> obvious situations, having a list with all the suggestions would be
>> annoying. So, it might be interesting to have the list filtered with the
>> current element's value to be able to use the list attribute for large
>> list and have a boolean attribute to enable or disable the filtering.
>
> There is a distinction between the combo-box style UI of a finite list of
> suggestions, and "Google suggest"-style UI -- but that difference is not
> related to filtering, IMHO. It's more related to the volume of possible
> data. In both cases you would want filtering for an ideal UI, IMHO.
>
>
>> One simple use case would be a city transportation website. If you have
>> to type a station name in a field it might be much more user friendly to
>> have a filtered list.
>>
>> Actually, I do not see any use case of the list attribute without
>> filtering. To me, it seems like a replacement of a select with options
>> and an input fields in the case of "none of the above". And I do not
>> think this replacement would be better. I am wondering what were the use
>> cases in mind?
>
> The use case is more or less what you describe -- just look around your
> operating system's configuration UI for instance for lots of examples of
> this kind of thing.
>
> The thing that makes this different than "Google suggest"-style UI is that
> in the latter case you need a script that continually polls for more
> appropriate suggestions and updates the list -- for this kind of thing
> we'd probably want to use a direct API, we wouldn't want to have scripts
> have to poke at the <datalist> DOM in real time.

Why not?

The firefox implementation should allow this (though I haven't tried
this myself). Feel free to try it out and let us know how well/poorly
it works.

/ Jonas