Re: Form Tags incorrect

Andy Laws wrote:
> 
> I have take over some code that was written a few years ago and the 
> purpose is to generate a static html form
> this allows our company to give the clients a flat file form with js 
> validation rules embedded into it
> 
> i was horrified to see the following
>   <tr>
>        <td>Klantnummer *</td>
>        <td><input id=agdMailRowValue1 tabIndex=1 size=15 
> name=agdMailRowValue1 FormValidator="M-TXT-12" FormPrompt="Klantnummer" 

I'm not sure that this is actually illegal.  These attributes are only 
used for scripting, and HTML renderers are expected to ignore unknown 
attributes and the tags of unknown elements.  I would be pretty sure 
that it would be legal to access these from DOM 2, although the battle 
for DOM 2 is more or less lost (e.g. see current threads on the SVG 
list).  I'm not sure whether DOM 0 specifies that attributes of the 
element become attributes of the corresponding object, but I'm not quite 
sure where the definitive specification of DOM 0 is, even though most 
designers use DOM 0 extensively.

If the form doesn't work with scripting off, you have a real problem. 
If all it needs is a modified DTD, to make the attributes legal, it may 
not be much of a problem, unless the scripting assumes the attributes 
appear on the objects and DOM 0 doesn't guarantee that.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Monday, 27 July 2009 20:42:31 UTC