[whatwg] Incremental rendering of forms

> Document order is not necessarily visual flow or user-logical order.
> Consider: one form per table column, instead of per table row as
> mentioned above. HTML tables are row-centric, not column centric.
> Since we are not altering table behavior in any way with web
> forms 2, then allowing fields to dis-associate from form containers
> seems vital for a case like this.
> 
> While we might want to open up some element's content models,
> it wouldn't solve all use cases.

If its just a question of having the presentional order being diffent than
the structural order, all kinds of tricks can be done with CSS positioning.

Usually structural relationships in HTML is defined through containment.
This has some limitations, like you cannot have a quote starting in the
middle of one paragraph, and continuing into another. This is a tradeof
between power and simplicity. Styling, DOM manipulation, event bubbling,
incremental rendering etc. is much esier to grasp with a tree structure.

Allowing form-associations to be orthogonal to document structure
certainly enables structures that was not possible otherwise, the question
is whether the use cases are important enough to justify the added complexity.

Olav Junker Kj?r

Received on Monday, 9 August 2004 02:28:42 UTC