Kinds of switch elements via "appearance"

We had some hard won progress at the face to face meeting regarding the 
difference between non-relevant versus absent user interface form 
controls.

We also recognized that we need some improvements to the switch element to 
support the different kinds of UI switching.

I realize that the appearance attribute is regarded as a "hint", but 
1) it already exists and would allow current implementations to establish 
a "common practice"
2) the notion of "hint" is really codewords for behaviors that might be 
regarded as either recommended or optional, as opposed to required, and 
the things we want out of switch seem to be at that level anyway
3) the appearance suggestion in other cases does tend to take on the 
"recommended" level of common practice, e.g. minimal/compact/full 
appearance on select or select1... does anybody really *not* do those 
without a good technical reason?

Anyway, if you can accept at least for the purpose of discussion the use 
of appearance, then the particular keywords we have for appearance seem to 
map nicely to our new terminology and also to the kinds of UI switching we 
seem to need, as follows:

1) A switch with appearance="minimal" could mean that the non-selected 
cases are absent

2) A switch with appearance="compact" could mean that the non-selected 
cases are present but non-relevant 

3) A switch with appearance="full" could mean that the non-selected cases 
are present and relevant.  There would need to be a little "common 
practice" defined for how to then connect the non-selectedness of a case 
to a CSS pseudo-class.  I would expect full appearance switches to be more 
easily styled as a tabbed view, and I would expect the form controls in 
the non-selected cases to still participate in validity notifications and 
such. 

Let's talk about this more on the list and in an upcoming telecon.

Thanks,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Lotus Forms
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

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