Re: Rendering of xf:input with integer binding

Philip,

We discussed your message today at the Forms WG teleconference and have 
a few more suggestions.

Steven Pemberton correctly pointed out that you can use appearance to 
control input, and since the up/down buttons are presentation, it seems 
appropriate to control them by appearance; however, Steven also 
suggested that the WG might consider recommending /minimal/ to mean a 
truly minimal appearance (as we do suggest with trigger), and /full/ 
might be an even fuller experience, perhaps with a calculator 
available.  So, again, it looks like the ultimate styling of 
presentation may be something best left up to the implementations using 
host-language or other facilities.

I noted that not all input controls bound to integers would benefit from 
+1 / -1 buttons:
<input ref="ram">
<label>How many bytes of RAM does your computer have?</label>
</input>

Philip Fennell suggested that the up/down controls for discrete values 
of integers sounds more like an XForms range control than an input.  So, 
you might consider using range/@appearance to control the presentation 
of range when bound to an integer type.

In summary, it seems that your form authors have a valid point, that 
they +1/-1 is not appropriate for all integers, given the unbounded 
nature of integers, and while Steven is correct that your XForms 
implementation can interpret the appearance attribute to control any 
presentation interaction, it may be that the best bet is to migrate the 
+1/-1 to range bound to integer (and its restrictions) and let the form 
author specify the @appearance there.  The range control would of course 
be free to examine the range attributes (start, end, step) and offer 
additional affordances; for example, f range were small and step=1, the 
up/down buttons would be useful, but for moderate range (say, 
0-1000000), an odometer style is often popular, where the control would 
be populated with a set of digits that span the allowed range, and each 
digit is separately manipulable.

Leigh.


[1] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-forms/2010Oct/att-0008/2010-10-13.html#topic5