[Bug 10809] i18n comment 3 : new attribute: submitdir

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10809

--- Comment #29 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> 2010-10-27 20:04:47 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #28)
> Applications won't suddenly have to do anything. If they want to use the
> explicit direction information, they would turn on submitdir and provide a
> place to store the direction bit.

Sure, but I'm saying it's not really any more effort to emulate it in
JavaScript as well, once you're doing that much work.

> If so, why did all the browsers bother to provide the built-in direction
> selection feature? Applications could always do it in script.

If authors want to preserve directionality on forms, and they can do so in
script with not much more work than with a dedicated declarative feature, you
can expect them to do so.  If authors don't want to preserve directionality on
forms, nobody can force them to, so it's moot.

By contrast, users want to be able to select direction regardless of whether
the author wrote any script to do it.  Browsers provide the feature because
that way it works even if the author doesn't know or care about directionality
at all.  That's not possible in this case, because the author's application has
to explicitly opt in to the directionality info no matter what.

> The problem is that the round trip takes something like five years. I have an
> application for it right now.

The same is true of countless other features that people want to be part of the
web platform.  They need to be prioritized somehow.  One guideline for that is
that we don't provide declarative features for things that can be easily
emulated in script unless it's a very common or error-prone use-case.

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Received on Wednesday, 27 October 2010 20:04:50 UTC