RE: underscore underscore undercore...

Seth Rothberg wrote:

> I noticed that Netscape 4 wouldn't render the input tag.

That's true; it ignores all form fields when they do not
appear within a <form> element. Although Netscape 4 is
finally losing importance, this problem is still relevant
here, since the fields have a very essential role in the plan.

> Will boxing the relevant parts of the page in a bogus
> form tag fix Netscape without breaking anything else? 

It causes some risks, since the form might get accidentally
submitted. In fact, several browsers submit a form if you
hit Enter in an input field! And using action="" won't help,
since it will be taken as referring to (the start of) the
current document. There are different ways to cope with
such problems, but some problems will remain.

Perhaps most importantly, although the plan is an interesting
invention and sounds good first, it has a fundamental problem:
an <input> element still _means_ user input, not just a
presentation of a placeholder. In particular, a normal speech
browser can be expected to _stop_ whenever it encounters such
an element and prompt the user for input, or at least go to a
state of waiting for user input or user's explicit request to
go forward. After all, this is what they really need to do
for normal forms with normal input fields.

-- 
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser 
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi/  My phone +358 9 4763 0397

Received on Monday, 18 November 2002 02:15:34 UTC