- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 13:44:08 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote: > Ian Hickson wrote: >> I feel I missed something somewhere. What is wrong with <datalist>? > > It mixes the legacy markup and <option> elements Right, why is that bad? It's like how <map> mixes legacy markup and <a> elements. > and in fact could even theoretically allow invalid legacy markup on WF2 > clients, since on such clients it ignores everything but <option> > elements. I don't understand what you mean by this. > So I could do the following... > > <datalist id="myList"> > <html> > <body></body> > <body></body> > <head> > <select> > <option>Item 1</option> > </select> > <select> > <option>Item 2</option> > </select> > <select> > </select> > <option>Item 3</option> > <option>Item 4</option> > <option>Item 5</option> > </head> > </html> > </datalist> This would be invalid, though. I mean, you could always put any random tag in any random place, indeed a large proportion of HTML authors seem to think this is perfectly normal. There is nothing that I can see about <datalist> that introduces or encourages this at all. > ...And a WF2-compliant UA would treat the above the same as this: > > <datalist id="myList"> > <option>Item 1</option> > <option>Item 2</option> > <option>Item 3</option> > <option>Item 4</option> > <option>Item 5</option> > </datalist> > > In other words, there is no separation of legacy code and list > options. The same might be true with <select>, of course, but there it's > not rendered because the markup isn't supposed to be there in the first > place, not because it's defined as a way of handling legacy code. What's the difference? > Despite my distaste for how <datalist> handles legacy code, I must > concede that it is the best solution presented on the mailing list, and > I approve of its inclusion in the latest draft of Web Forms 2.0. I agree it's not perfect, but yeah, I think it's the best one so far. When the requirements are somewhat self-contradictory, it's hard to come up with the ideal solution. :-) -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 9 July 2004 06:44:08 UTC