Re: Comment from CSS WG on HTML DOM draft

We am getting geared up to implement a .indeterminate attribute in
Mozilla.  Here is some wording if it'll help speed things along.

The only implications for the DOM of using IE's implementation instead
of tristate are in submittability and changing the checked property. 
IE's implementation is geared toward submitting the element whether it
is indeterminate or not.  With tristate you wouldn't want to submit an
indeterminate element.  With IE's implementation, changing the
indeterminate attribute with JavaScript should not affect the value of
checked.  With tristate, you could conceivably set checked to false when
indeterminate is set, just to keep the combination of
checked+indeterminate down to three states.


Wording for IE's implementation:

indeterminate of type boolean
   When the type attribute of the element has the value "radio" or
"checkbox", this represents whether the element's checked state is
undetermined.  Changes to this attribute do not affect the checked
property or the submission of the form control.


Wording for Tristate:

indeterminate of type boolean
   When the type attribute of the element has the value "radio" or
"checkbox", this represents whether the element's checked state is
undetermined.  Changes to this attribute [do not] affect the checked
property.  When this attribute is true, the form control cannot be
successful.


Two cents: I disagree that two separate implementations by the same
vendor should have any more weight than one, unless it's a question of
"how implementable is this solution."  I do not think that is the
question here.  Backwards compatibility, however, is an issue, and I
think that speaks strongly for Microsoft's implementation (especially
since there are no competing implementations that I know of).  If we
want to use a tristate implementation, we should probably choose a
different name so as not to break the web.

For all who are interested, Microsoft's current documentation on this
element is located at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/properties/indeterminate.asp.  It is geared more towards the visual than the DOM is, but it should give a pretty good idea.

--John Keiser

Received on Friday, 18 January 2002 20:46:38 UTC