Re: HTML L2: Add HTMLFormControl interface as ancestor to form controls

On Fri, 2002-06-21 at 10:08, Curt Arnold wrote:
> I believe it would be beneficial to add a HTMLFormControl interface to 
> be used as a common ancestor interface for the form control interfaces. 
>  This should have no end-user detectable affect from scripting languages 
> since the existing interfaces share identically named attributes. 
>  However, it would allow strongly-typed languages to operate on the 
> common attributes of form controls without resorting to reflection.
> 
> For example, in JavaScript you could do:
> 
> var controls = form.elements();
> for(var i = 0; i < controls.length; i++) {
>     controls.item(i).disabled = true;
> }
> 
> But you could not readily do the equivalent in Java.
> 
> The interface could look something like:
> 
> interface HTMLFormControl : HTMLElement {
>     readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
>     attribute DOMString name;
>     attribute DOMString value;
>    attribute boolean disabled;
>     //
>     //   these attributes are not currently in all form control interfaces
>     //    
>    attribute DOMString defaultValue;
>    attribute DOMString accessKey;
>    attribute long tabIndex;
> }

The DOM HTML is not widely used in Java, so we only considered the
improvement from a DOM ECMAScript perspective. The proposed change does
not add in fact a valuable improvement for ECMAScript users and could
introduce binary incompatibility in other bindings. Based on that, we
choose to leave the current proposal as it stands.

Philippe

[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/06/DOM-Level-2-HTML-CR-issues/all.html#curt1

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 2002 18:21:09 UTC