- From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 09:19:49 -0600
- To: www-forms@w3.org
- Cc: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>
- Message-Id: <DA8F7D72-CD5F-46C3-A4A4-C4F266C39577@blackmesatech.com>
Working on a simple XForms exercise today, I ran across an unexpected interaction between the relevant attribute on the xf:bind element and my CSS stylesheet -- or what looks to me at first glance like such an interaction. Following the example shown at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XForms/Address_Aligned I have used CSS to style fieldset, xf:input, xf:label, and the CSS pseudo-element xf|input::value with the values table, table-row, and table-cell, respectively, for the CSS display property. This worked rather nicely, I thought. But when I added a relevance test to the appropriate bind elements, I was a little surprised to see that although the 'relevant' attribute seems to have the expected effect on the submitted XML (that is, irrelevant elements are omitted), it doesn't seem to have any effect on the display, when using the Mozilla XForms extension. Is this the prescribed behavior? A legal behavior? A shortcoming in the current implementation of the Mozilla extension? An error on my part? Zero or more of the above? I had expected (perhaps naively) that the CSS properties assigned to forms widgets would apply only when the widgets themselves were relevant, but it appears from this side of the keyboard that the use of table-related display properties is overriding the relevance setting, as far as visibility is concerned. Does the XForms spec specify the interaction between the setting of visibility using the 'relevant' attribute on xf:bind, and the setting of CSS properties? Is the behavior I'm seeing a bug in the Mozilla extension? Or is interaction with style mechanisms explicitly left implementation-defined or implementation-dependent? I've tried to replicate the problem using Orbeon, but there the display: table, display:table-row, and display: table-cell clauses in my CSS appear to have no effect, so I haven't succeeded in using Orbeon's implementation to test for interaction between CSS and XForms visibility. As you can tell, I'm not even sure what questions to ask here. If it's a bug in the Mozilla implementation, I should be raising this on one of their implementation-specific discussion lists, not here. But at the moment, I think I'm mostly trying to learn what obligations the spec imposes on implementations in situations like this one. Any illumination readers of this list can throw on my problem would be gratefully accepted. I attach the form that illustrates the phenomenon. When the table styling is commented out, the selection of the 'Cash' option causes the credit-card number and expiration date to disappear, but when the CSS table styling is present, the credit card details are always visible. -- **************************************************************** * C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC * http://www.blackmesatech.com * http://cmsmcq.com/mib * http://balisage.net ****************************************************************
Attachments
- application/xhtml+xml attachment: cc.05.xhtml
Received on Thursday, 6 August 2009 15:20:28 UTC