[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 comments

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Sander wrote:
>
> The parsing of [ID] is by default limited to the "for", "form",
> "headers", "id", "name" and "template" attributes. For those cases where
> inserting the [ID] in another attribute is desired, a new attribute
> "parseattributes" (needs a better name, obviously) is defined for use
> within a repetition template. This attribute is used to specify a
> comma-separated list of those attributes of descendant elements in which
> the [ID]-string will be searched for and replaced by the repetition
> block's index. This specified list of attributes replaces the default.
> Thus, if this attribute exists, but is empty, no attributes will be
> matched.

I really don't like this. It might be the only solution though.

How about this? We say that all attributes are processed, except those
starting with the two character string "[]", which just have their two
leading square brackets removed and are otherwise untouched.

Then any unsafe attributes can just have "[]" put at the front.

Ugly, but at least we don't have a weird attribute and a list of magical
attributes that get processed...


>>> More on repetition: I find the existence of the <repeat> element next to
>>> the repeat attribute with numerical value to be confusing. I suggest
>>> dropping the latter. (Comparing against an older draft, I vaguely
>>> suspect this already being the plan, with the necessary editing simply
>>> not having been done yet.)
>>
>> Not sure what you meant by this.
>
> You specify both repetition blocks (3.2.2: "An element ... with the repeat
> attribute ..., with the attribute's value equal to an integer") and initial
> repetition blocks (3.5.4: "The repeat element ... is used to insert
> repetition blocks without having to explicitly copy the repetition template
> markup in the source document.")
> I just now grokked that the former might exist so that you can (dynamically)
> set the "repeat" attribute on an existing element to turn it into a
> repetition block, but the benefit of setting an attribute versus replacing
> a node seems very small to me, and the existence of two ways to create a
> repetition block both confusing and wasteful.

The existence of the numeric "repeat" _attribute_ is largely because when
you hit the "Add" button, there needs to be a way of distinguishing the
repetition blocks from just random other blocks. That is, authors won't
generally use the numeric "repeat" attribute (it isn't mentioned in the
intro, for instance).


>> [<repeat>]
>
> I at least oppose the idea of removing it; no matter how odd or
> unconventional (though really, it's not that bad - it's just a
> placeholder for content to be added at run-time), the benefits of its
> existence are huge.

Ok.


>> Maybe we should drop "precision" altogether and just have "step", then
>> make it apply to all the numeric and date/time types.
>
> That's throwing away the ability to specify logarithmic numbers. Not
> used very often admittedly (at least in my experience), but the
> possibility of them is very welcome nonetheless.

We can add them back if there really is a good use case. I haven't seen
one, to be honest. I originally added it because it fit into the model
easily. It no longer fits into the model easily.


> I'm personally leaning toward the earlier suggestion of a list of
> datetime-part values ""y,m" for expdate, "y,w" for week, "y,m,d,h,M""
> (which you called "nice and generic, but ... much more complicated"),
> but extended to (for example) "h,15M" - which would specify a precision
> of 15 minute increments for a time consisting of hours and minutes. I
> think authors will be more than willing to put up with the complexity of
> this (I know I would be) to have just one general purpose datetime
> element which can deal with all the weird requirements which comes up in
> actual use.

Is the current text (using step) acceptable?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 21 June 2004 07:38:46 UTC