Re: All Radio Buttons Up Condition needs clarifying - HTML 4.01.

On Fri, 14 Apr 2000, Dave  J Woolley wrote:

> Someone has just sent a bug report to the lynx-dev
> mailing list claiming that Lynx is at fault for
> choosing a default radio button if none are marked
> checked in the document.

There are so many bug reports against _correct_ browser behavior. :-)

> Reading the HTML 4.01 
> specification leaves me confused as to what is really
> intended, although all of Amaya, Netscape and IE seem
> to start with no buttons down in that case.

Well, this is a confusing area. It is discussed by Alan Flavell at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7eflavell/www/testradio.html
and by me at
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/forms/choices.html#app

Briefly, the HTML 2.0 specification required that the user agent
provide a default (of the first item) when no author-specified default
exists. The HTML 3.2 specification made the additional requirement on
authors (and documents) that a form must provide a default. 
Then came HTML 4.0 and messed things up, perhaps because the
popular browser behavior did not comply with the old requirement
and it was difficult to decide what the specs should say. 

The sensible approach to this would be to re-establish the requirement on
_documents_ to provide a default (thereby declaring documents as
non-conforming if they fail to do that). Requirements on browsers would
probably be futile, but this would in fact be an area where some specific
error processing should be required.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Friday, 14 April 2000 08:55:27 UTC