[Bug 13769] Whitespace-only values should be considered empty in required form fields

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13769

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #16 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 2011-09-30 20:08:28 UTC ---
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale:

Making required="" special-case one of the many invisible characters in Unicode
would lead authors to simply not think about this case at all, which isn't
really an option IMHO.

Only removing invisible characters still doesn't really solve the problem,
which is that for freeform fields there's all kinds of ways of not answering.
Why would we make users use "." instead of " " if they want to work around the
form claiming that a freeform field is required?

In fact, making a freeform field required doesn't make that much sense to start
with. It makes sense for cases that have particular data structure (e.g. types
other than text, or when there's a pattern), but why would you mark a freeform
field as "required" and then disallow " " but not "."?

In the case where you really want to disallow just spaces, but are ok with
letting the user work around this in one of the many other ways one can do so,
the pattern="" attribute already provides a simple way to do so.

If people use that pattern a lot, that would be good evidence that I'm wrong
here, but in the absence of evidence to that effect, I don't think the
arguments presented are compelling enough to justify making the language
somewhat magical here.

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Received on Friday, 30 September 2011 20:08:34 UTC