Re: Requirements for research (Was: Dropping <input usemap="">)

Robert Burns wrote:
> On Aug 16, 2007, at 9:55 AM, Robert Burns wrote:
>> In any event, it sounds like we wouldn't be breaking much content if 
>> we specced <input usemap> in a slightly different way than the current 
>> draft (or at least the draft before the changes were made that did not 
>> reflect the views of the WG).

If it is specced differently to how <input usemap> is currently 
implemented in any browser, then <input usemap> is the worst possible 
name for the feature. It doesn't act consistently in all the current 
browsers, so it's very unlikely to degrade gracefully, and it would be 
incompatible with a small amount of existing content. <input 
anyothernewname> is consistently ignored and has never been used, so it 
is likely to be a better choice for a new feature.

If you want a new feature that is not specified or implemented anywhere, 
it should be proposed as a new feature, and if there are suitable use 
cases (i.e. there are existing problems where the new feature is a 
significantly better solution than any existing technology) then details 
of syntax can be considered - that would be much more helpful than 
starting with an existing syntax (<input usemap>) and then trying to 
think of a feature to fit into that syntax to justify its existence.

> What I would like to explore is how the big browsers handle the feature 
> now. Do you have any tools up you use to test these things?

Just <http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/>, and 
thinking about what are likely to be interesting cases and then testing 
them to see what happens, and being careful to interpret the results 
correctly before making assumptions about the behaviour.

-- 
Philip Taylor
philip@zaynar.demon.co.uk

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2007 15:23:39 UTC