Re: [css3-ui]? Proposal for ::error pseudoelement

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Bert Bos <bert@w3.org> wrote:
> Even assuming the browser displays error messages at all, there is no
> need for the author to style them, because they are not part of the
> visual identity of the page. You normally don't even see them. But most
> of all they are part of a dialog between the user and his browser, not
> between the user and the author.

But whether authors will want to style them depends on how they're
presented.  If browsers show the errors interspersed with the page
content, then they *will* want to be able to style them.  Opera's
little boxes would look seriously out of place on a site with a nice
style that, for instance, was light-on-dark.  If other browsers come
up with different UI, then it might become a nonissue, but it really
does depend.

> Imagine that authors would be able to style all of the browser's hints
> and messages. Suddenly what looked like a hint before now looks like an
> error, and the beep that previously signalled success now means that
> something is wrong... Filling in forms would take three times as long.

I think you're greatly overstating things here.  Desktop applications
don't have a standard way for indicating what's an error, as far as I
know -- why should web apps?  (Actually, *do* any desktop toolkits
provide standard error handling for forms?)  In practice, it's a
certainty that some sites will want to have finer control over their
own error handling -- and they can do so via JavaScript, as they do
now but with the convenient HTML 5 framework.  They just shouldn't
feel forced to to get their site to look good.

Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 21:04:41 UTC