[whatwg] Make "foo at bar.com, " a valid email address list

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:31:04 +0200, Mounir Lamouri  
<mounir.lamouri at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the moment, a valid email address list is a set of comma-separated
> tokens where each tokens are a valid email address so in the case of
> "foo at bar.com, ", "foo at bar.com" is a valid email address but not "".

I do not really get why it being comma-separated is not just the  
submission format. The UI could be quite different. E.g. on the iPhone  
email client it is more like an inline list. I think the specification is  
simply not abstract enough here, as it is for the other controls.


> Unfortunately, as soon as you want to put a UI on top of that, values
> will always be appended by ", ". Indeed, a comma have to be added to
> mark that the user is now editing another email address so the UI can
> suggests new ones. Without adding the comma automatically, the user
> would have to add it by hand to have the UI suggesting new entries.
> So, if we do not fix the specifications, all <input type='email'
> multiple> with a UI will be whether invalid or really annoying to  
> implement.
>
> You can found an example of that kind of UI in GMail.
>
> I think we should change the specifications so an email address list
> will be valid if it's ending with a comma (plus trailing whitespaces).
> In other words, if a list of email address have more than one token, the
> last one can be the empty string.
>
> We are thinking of implementing this change in Gecko 2.0 so feedback are
> very welcome.

I think it would be better to simply omit that trailing comma. Which  
should be allowed. If the specification currently does not allow that  
(somehow) it would be a bug and is just something that needs clarification.


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