[whatwg] Form validation against invisible controls

[Peter Kasting]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bw3c at gmail.com>
> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:11 PM, TAMURA, Kent <tkent at chromium.org> wrote:
> > Oh, I'm sorry.  I have found a sentence about visibility in the draft.
> >
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/association-of-controls-and-forms.html#constraint-validation
> >> If one of the controls is not being rendered (e.g. it has
> >> the hidden attribute set) then user agents may report a script error.
> >
> > The Chrome bug report is
> > here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=45640
>
> I think this isn't a feasible strategy to pursue.  You'd have to
> carefully define what's "not being rendered", and it will violate
> layering massively.  CSS should not be able to override constraints
> set in HTML.  The latter are part of the semantics of the form, and
> the former is supposed to only control presentation.
>
> If the user can't actually change the form to match requirements,
> that's a bug in the page.  The browser should not try to guess what
> the page really meant using some inevitably complicated heuristic.  It
> should respect what the page says, and make it not work.  If the
> browser has a UI for form validation errors, it can use that to tell
> the user what the problem is in terms that the page author can
> understand, so the user can report it and the page can be fixed.


I posted this on the Chromium bug, but I take the sentence Kent quotes to
affect only the UI shown on a validation failure, not the actual results of
validation.  That is, if a control fails validation and has the "hidden"
attribute, validation still fails, but the UA may display a message
indicating the page has an error in addition to/instead of the normal
validation failure message.

I agree that it would be a mistake to exclude "invisible" elements from
validation, as that would be a rathole (and seems conceptually wrong to me).

PK
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