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

[Jonas Sicking]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Mounir Lamouri
> <mounir.lamouri at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 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 "".
>>
>> 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.
>
> Gmail also allows addresses like "Aryeh Gregor
> <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com>", which are not valid e-mail addresses per
> spec.  Good UI here would be to accept an address like that but strip
> the part outside of the <> for the purpose of submission and script
> access.  Likewise, you can just strip the trailing comma for
> submission and script access.  The entire current spec seems to be
> built around the idea that browsers should accept relatively free-form
> input but make sure it's only visible to the server or scripts in a
> tidied-up form, so that author-written scripts (whether server-side or
> client-side) can assume a simple format that's easy to work with.

Actually, pages like gmail needs and uses the whole string "Aryeh
Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com>", so you don't want to strip it down
to just the email address. I suspect that we'll end up having to
support this format of email addresses too, either as another @type
value, or using some opt-in boolean attribute.

/ Jonas