[whatwg] Confirming passwords and such

(This seems like a rather obvious feature so I apologize if this has
been discussed or decided against before and I missed that
conversation.)

One of the most common types of form validation that I see is the
checking to make sure that two text-ish fields contain the same
values. I would suggest something like the following to deal with
this:
<label>Enter Password<input type="password" name="beef" id="foo"></label>
<label>Confirm Password<input type="password" confirm="foo"
name="checkfoo"></label>
(I don't really like confirm as the name of the attribute but I can't
come up with anything better at the moment)
Obviously, if the two fields didn't match, a validation error.
Only the first control would be successful.
I suppose you could have more than one than one input confirming the
same thing, but I wouldn't really see the point.
This would degrade very nicely as long as the server remembered to
check for the presence of checkfoo, which would indicate a legacy
browser and the need for the server to test for consistency.
While the confirm attribute could be implemented for every input type,
I wouldn't see any use with types like date(time) or radio. It should
probably restricted to the types where it would be useful: password,
text, email, number (yesterday, I was registering my cell phone online
and needed to type in the phone's serial number twice for
confirmation), and possibly uri.

Any thoughts?

-Will Levine

Received on Tuesday, 29 June 2004 07:21:42 UTC