- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:44:30 -0800
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote: > On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Mounir Lamouri wrote: >> >> The list attribute on input elements let the author specify a list >> of pre-defined suggestions via the datalist element (each option of the >> datalist is a suggestion). It looks like the idea is to have all the >> suggestions showing like a combobox which is more or less confirmed by >> Hixie. [http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9785] >> >> However, it sounds like having a static combobox would only fulfill some >> use cases (ie. when a very small set of suggestions is defined). In most >> obvious situations, having a list with all the suggestions would be >> annoying. So, it might be interesting to have the list filtered with the >> current element's value to be able to use the list attribute for large >> list and have a boolean attribute to enable or disable the filtering. > > There is a distinction between the combo-box style UI of a finite list of > suggestions, and "Google suggest"-style UI -- but that difference is not > related to filtering, IMHO. It's more related to the volume of possible > data. In both cases you would want filtering for an ideal UI, IMHO. > > >> One simple use case would be a city transportation website. If you have >> to type a station name in a field it might be much more user friendly to >> have a filtered list. >> >> Actually, I do not see any use case of the list attribute without >> filtering. To me, it seems like a replacement of a select with options >> and an input fields in the case of "none of the above". And I do not >> think this replacement would be better. I am wondering what were the use >> cases in mind? > > The use case is more or less what you describe -- just look around your > operating system's configuration UI for instance for lots of examples of > this kind of thing. > > The thing that makes this different than "Google suggest"-style UI is that > in the latter case you need a script that continually polls for more > appropriate suggestions and updates the list -- for this kind of thing > we'd probably want to use a direct API, we wouldn't want to have scripts > have to poke at the <datalist> DOM in real time. Why not? The firefox implementation should allow this (though I haven't tried this myself). Feel free to try it out and let us know how well/poorly it works. / Jonas
Received on Friday, 31 December 2010 00:44:30 UTC