[whatwg] validationMessage

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:05:54 +0100, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com>  
wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas at sicking.cc> wrote:
>> Would be great if you could provide a reason why you feel this way.
>
> Did the previous messages in the thread not say enough reasons?  Ian's
> response was basically "then how would we solve use cases 1 and 2?" which
> was why I was clarifying that I did not have an alternative solution, I  
> felt that they are cases we should not be trying to solve.

You wrote in that thread:

> This seems like an attempt to make life slightly easier on webpage 
> authors by providing boilerplate UI if they don't want to write 
> anything.  But I see that as a small benefit with significant edge 
> cases.  Authors are already expected to supply the textual content inthe  
> page, the text in alerts, etc., so providing the text in the"validation  
> failed" UI doesn't seem that bad.  The UA can still dothings like turn  
> fields red or add warning sign icons or something if itlikes.

Isn't the benefit rather big? I can just use <input type=email> on my page  
and the user agent will take care of ensuring it is correct (on the client  
side) and provide the appropriate messages to the user in case the user  
made a mistake. Anything beyond that will require scripting which seems  
overkill for e.g. blog comments.

I'm not too convinced with #2 though so exposing the message is probably  
not needed. (And if the user agent can somehow provide a non-textual user  
interface for the above that should be allowed too.)


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/