[whatwg] Output of web applications

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 8 Jan 2010, Nikita Popov wrote:
>
> 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?

We had something like this in an earlier version of HTML5, but we removed 
it at one point when paring the spec down to keep it under control. I 
imagine we'll revisit this in a few years when we add another round of 
features, but for now I think it's best if we let the browser vendors 
catch up with what we've already added so far in this revision.

Note that HTML5 does have an <output> element, though it is for something 
a bit different (primarily calculation results).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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