Why XForms 1.1 output/@mediatype exclude text/*?

Why is the proposed XForms 1.1 output/@mediatype limited to nontext
types?

http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms11/#render-nontext

Even before XForms 1.0, FormsPlayer had implemented and shown the value
of output bound to text/html.

Since Atom support is a goal, this would fit right in, as RFC 4287
defines two formats for carrying markup in text fields:
An escaped text/html form and a complex-content application/xhtml+xml
form.  

Here's how you could refer to an Atom title with xf:output/@mediatype,
as described
in http://atompub.org/rfc4287.html#text.constructs
   <xf:output ref="atom:title[@type='html'] mediatype="text/html" />

I've recently written a mail reader in XHTML+XForms, and both output and
textarea with @mediatype='text/html' would be great.
  <xf:output ref="content" mediatype="text/html" />
  ...
  <xf:textarea ref="content"
mediatype="text/html"><xf:label>Message</xf:label></xf:textarea>

Many existing browsers already support text/html editing in forms, and a
number of JavaScript packages exist to make it easy to use.
With XForms, just declaring the mediatype would make it easy to use!
But user agents can't do this if XForms 1.1 explicitly limits mediatype
to exclude text/* mediatypes.

Leigh.

Received on Wednesday, 16 August 2006 18:49:26 UTC