- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
- Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 20:57:55 -0500
2.3: It's not clear what happens in XHTML when a non-empty form is placed in the head. That is, is emptyness a conformance requirement for authors or UAs, and what are UAs expected to do about it? It's not clear what should happen if the constraint in the paragraph starting with "The children of a form element must be block-level elements" is violated. Is this constraint to be enforced by UAs (if so, how), or by authors (if so, what are UAs expected to do if it's not?). The specification says: "In any case, events targeted at form controls within a label must not be handled by the label itself." What about links within a label? What about nested labels? The section on implicit submission does not talk about firing click events, if any, on the submit button. IE does this in some cases (though not others), and web sites depend on them being fired when IE does fire them.... 2.4: ISO8601 claims to be a "Withdrawn standard". Is this an issue? If I understand correctly, Week 1 of a year may contain some days from the previous year, right? If the last day of a year is a Monday, will the week containing it be considered Week 1 of the next year, or Week 53 of the current year, or both? None of this is very clear to me from the text... Controls with no default value specified are supposed to have no value selected. At the same time, the widget types recommended for rendering the control (eg the clock recommended for time) do not lend themselves well to having no value selected. They lend themselves even less to having a value unselected (the equivalent of a user clearing a text control completely), and it's not clear whether UAs may, should, must, should not, or must not allow form control values to be cleared by the user. The terms "no value selected" and "left blank" are used interchangeably here, it seems. Perhaps it would be good to settle on one of the terms (and define it somewhere)? "Empty fields (those with no value) do not need to match their type." -- it's not clear what this means. Does "no value" mean the same as "no value selected" or "left blank"? What does it mean for a field to "match its type"? What happens to selected values when the type of a form control is changed? Should the UA attempt to perform some sort of conversion to the new type? What happens to selected values when the min/max/step attributes of a form control are changed? Should they be coerced to the closest valid value? Note that there may be cases when the selected value can no longer be shown using the widget that shows the control's value (eg a range control's max may be changed to be less than the current slider position). What happens if the 'value' DOM attribute is set to a string that's not in a valid format for the control type? What happens if the 'value' DOM attribute is set to a string that's out of range given the min/max attributes on the control or isn't an integral number of steps from the min or max? Note that there may be cases when the widget being used for the control can't show the out-of-bounds value (eg it's a range slider). 2.4.1: "A field with a max less than its min can never be satisfied when it has a value" -- there is no definition of "satisfied" in this specification. What happens to the default min/max values if the form control type is changed? I assume they are reset to the default values for the new type, but that's not obvious from this specification. 2.4.2: Description of 1970-W01 should probably talk about 1970-01-04, not 1970-01-01. What happens if the step of a number or range control is set to a nonpositive number? Is this treated as if step were not set? If so, that's not obvious from the text here. If the UA rounds to the nearest allowed value, does that mean "allowed by step and within the min/max constraints"? In other words, given <input type="number" min="0" max="99" step="15">, what should 98 be rounded to? 105, 90, or something else? I'm not sure what to make of the recommendation for doing comparisons in string form when dealing with number types or with step. It sounds pretty complicated to get right for those cases... 2.5: If a fieldset is disabled, does that affect the value of the DOM attribute disabled on descendant form controls? Or just their visual appearance and behavior? Implementing maxlength efficiently on textarea as described (esp. for the wrap=hard case) is likely to be somewhat difficult. I don't really have a decent suggestion on how this can be improved, but I fully expect uses to start complaining that typing in textareas with maxlength set is slow (with the display lagging behind the user), especially if the maxlength and the total text are both large. There have been repeated bugs filed on Mozilla to support readonly on radio and checkbox inputs (authors want the inputs to be successful but not allow the user to modify the value). This is not to say that Web Forms should allow this, necessarily, but it's worth considering.... I'm not sure what the clause "the interface concept of 'readonly' values does not apply to button-like interfaces." means. I'm not sure what the sentence "The DOM readonly attribute ([DOM2HTML]) obviously applies to the same set of types as the HTML attribute." means -- the DOM attribute simply reflects the current HTML attribute value, no? Or is this sentence trying to say something stronger? -Boris
Received on Sunday, 10 July 2005 18:57:55 UTC