Re: PROPOSAL FOR A MULTI-COLUMN SELECT ELEMENT WITHIN A FORM FIELD

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In article <32271BDE.52FD@advtech.uswest.com>,
"Greg A. Smith" <gasmith@advtech.uswest.com> wrote:
> On some UNIX systems, developers have been able to kludge multi-
> column SELECTs by specifying PRE tags for the text displayed for
> the OPTIONs.  If the OPTION text has been pre-spaced so that it
> aligns in columns, the PRE tag should preserve this spacing on
> the user's display -- provided the user is using the specified
> platform.

Yikes. You're relying pretty much on how your browser renders the
SELECT element. 

> For this reason, I propose that the following FORM element be added
> to the HTML 3.2 specification.

Sorry, no chance of that:

The 13 Aug DTD says:

        This is subject to change, pending final approval by the W3C
        member companies. Changes are limited to bug fixes at this time.

Perhaps Cougar?

> MSELECT will be used as a FORM element like SELECT except that
> it will always be displayed as a list -- never as a pop-down menu.

So what exactly is it supposed to do? My browser doesn't display
SELECT as a pop-down menu, even when the SIZE is set to one.

> MSELECT uses OPTION tags for each of its selectable rows just as
> SELECT does, but it adds the following optional tags.
> 
> TITLE  specifies text to use as the title of the list box.
>        It uses an optional ALIGN attribute with the values: LEFT, RIGHT,
>        or CENTER.

This sounds a lot more like CAPTION. TITLE is already taken in the
head of the document.

> The OPTION tag works exactly as it does for SELECT with one exception:
> It must be followed by a set of MD tags instead of text.

Hm. You'd have to define a new element for this, then. You can't
define OPTION differently depending on the element it is used inside.

> MD     The number of MD tags for each OPTION must be the same. 

Why? Can't I just leave the last few MDs off if they're empty, like
you can do with table rows?

And how does my selected MD (which I suppose is what should happen)
transferred to the form? 

Maybe I'm missing something important, but I don't see the need for
this element. How would this differ from using a TABLE to align
multiple checkboxes?

Galactus

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E-mail: galactus@htmlhelp.com .................... PGP Key: 512/63B0E665
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Received on Saturday, 31 August 1996 14:57:51 UTC