- From: Malcolm Rowe <malcolm-what@farside.org.uk>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 13:38:12 +0100
Jim Ley writes: >> Sounds reasonable to me. WF2 controls could be styled via CSS in just the >> same way as any other form control. > could you give me a demo - say using Fantasai's interesting proposed > suggestions, of how they might be styled? Well, off the top of my head (and I can't remember what fantasai's proposal was, I'm afraid): we already have the standard positioning properties: height, {min-, max-,}width, position, and so on. I assume that those are well-defined for HTML form controls, so there's no reason to suppose they wouldn't be defined for WF2 controls. You have a theoretical problem in that you can't tell how a given UA will implement a particular control, but most UA's implement them as 'thin rectangular box', so this isn't a problem in practice. No reason to suspect that that would change with WF2. Then there's the properties that generally make sense to apply to all form controls: color, background-color, font, and so on. These aren't necessarily valid for all controls (does background-color affect <button>? how about border?), and aren't defined by HTML or CSS, so arguably, you shouldn't expect them to work. In practice, most of them work as you'd expect (though not necessarily inter-operably -- not surprising, since they've never been specified). Again, WF2 controls should 'support' these properties to the same extent as existing HTML form controls. Then, finally, there is a set of properties specific to the presentation of a particular control. I can't actually think of any obvious ones for HTML, and for WF2, the only ones that I can think of are the ones that have been suggested here: a way to format numbers and dates for display (date-display-format: short/long, I imagine). But there's only been relatively little discussion on this topic. In other words, the situation for WF2 controls is essentially the same as for the existing HTML form controls: not great, and not currently well-defined, but not insurmountable. Now, this situation ('styling of form controls is not defined') clearly isn't ideal, and it's well-understood that it should be defined, but the WF2 spec isn't the right place. I think that Ian commented on where the right place was, though I can't remember what he said (I think it was either one of the other two WHATWG specs, or as part of the W3C CSS WG). Regards, Malcolm
Received on Sunday, 11 July 2004 05:38:12 UTC