[whatwg] Output of web applications

[David Bruant]

Le 08/01/2010 06:13, Nikita Popov a écrit :
> I think everyone who uses PHP, JavaScript, a.s.o. knows, that at some 
> point the user makes something wrong and you want to throw an error 
> ("Your email's not valid (MX-Record not set.)") or an information 
> ("You have logged in successfully.").
>
> Know I do this using <div id="error"> or <div id="info"> analogically.
>
> As errors or other direct responses to user interaction are not the 
> same as some different text, I think there should be a possibility to 
> mark them up appropriately.
>
> I first searched in the Spec for some existing elements for output, 
> but only found <samp> which is for sample output only.
>
> I don't quite know which element name to use best, maybe:
>
> <output>
> <output error> / <output info(rmation)>
> <output type="error"> / <output type="info(rmation)">
> (The question is, what is <output>, error or info?)
>
> What do you think?
First of all, an <output> element already exists :

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-button-element.html#the-output-element
"The output element represents the result of a calculation."

What I have understood about it is that it is a sort of opposite of the 
the <input> element. In HTML 4, in order to display results of 
calculations, authors used to have an <input readonly id="output"> which 
was kind of absurd. The current <output> element seems to be here to 
fill this gap.

Is it enough for your needs ?

David