Repetition attributes

I think that the xforms:repeat-* attributes can be removed without loss 
of functionality. The reason they exist is said to be:

> A host language can include these attributes in the appropriate places to enable repeating constructs. For example, a version of XHTML might use:
> Example: Tables And Repeating Structures
> 
> <html:table xforms:repeat-nodeset="...">
>   <html:tr>
>     <html:td><xforms:output ref="..."/></html:td>
>   </html:tr>
> </html:table>

But I think that this is more dangerous than helpful. As the XForms 
specification says, "repeat" is a transformation. It unrolls elements 
multiple times. An XHTML user agent will happily validate and display 
the element above but it will do so in a very broken way (ignoring the 
whole attribute and treating the table as just a table). It would be 
better to have it trigger a validation error that will twig the user 
that they must run the HTML through an XForms pre-processor first. THEN 
they van validate it as HTML and finally render it as HTML.

  Paul Prescod

Received on Monday, 16 September 2002 17:41:09 UTC