[whatwg] Authoring feedback on <datalist>

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> I haven't reviewed that proposal closely, but I would expect <input type=text list=...> on Mac to use the standard Mac combobox control:
>
> Likewise on Windows it should show the standard combobox instead of what is pictured there.
>
> I would expect <input type=search list=...> to not show any extra buttons, but simply use the list much the way search suggestions work in the Safari built-in search field.

That works for me.  It doesn't cover the case where you want to take
over suggestions for something other than search, but I don't know of
anyone doing that.  Then again, I didn't even know what a combobox was
until this week, so I'm probably not the best to ask about that.  :)

> It's not clear to me that suggest=... is needed.

Well, a simple JS API would be useful independent of UI issues.  It's
a pain to have to create a datalist, make up an arbitrary id for it,
associate it with the input, and loop through your list to add
<option> children.  I'd expect to be able to do that in one line, if
search suggest is a major intended use case here.