[whatwg] Form element invalid message

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On 22 Sep 2010, at 16:14, Shiv Kumar wrote:
> In principle sure,

Glad you agree on the principle.

> But you already have attributes being used to present text to users.

HTML usually adopts the good pattern of putting human-readable text that might benefit from markup in elements (e.g. "label", "legend", "a", "button").

Sometimes it adopts the human-presentable-text-in-attributes antipattern (e.g. "alt" and "title" attributes).

These deviations are a sound lesson not to spread this antipattern further, *not* any sort of justification for repeating the mistake.

> 1. All the "value" attributes of say input elements, text area etc.

(a) "textarea" doesn't use an attribute for its value.

(b) "input value" is a bit different for "input validationMessage", since the value of an input is submitted as plain text, whereas a verification message (as demonstrated) is not necessarily plain text.

> It's not the end all be all solution for validations but
> it does also keep continue the paradigm.

New features should perpetuate the good paradigm represented by the "label" element, not the bad paradigm represented by the "title" attribute.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis