Thursday, March 8th, 2007
this post refers to the "Write" interface from WordPress utilized to post comments to WHATWG blogs.
there is well-intentioned, but mis-implemented markup in the edit form; namely, improper implemetation of the FIELDSET.
for a proper FIELDSET, one needs to do 4 things:
- open the
FIELDSET (which this form does)
- define a
LEGEND for the FIELDSET (which this form does NOT); the natural candidates for LEGEND are the level 3 headers (H3) classed dbx-handle so instead of repeatedly hearing "click to open this box", i would also get the pseudo-box (which i would call sub-forms) LEGEND as an indicator of what i am about to open or close. i would also make the alt text device independent - instead of "click here to open this box", i would propose "show sub-form" and "hide sub-form"
- bind individual
FORM controls to their textual labels by use of the LABEL element and the for/id mechanism that ties the form control (which takes the "id") to a LABEL (which takes the "for") or multiple labels; the LABEL should contain the actual, textual label, and NOT the FORM control, as in this form; this form has the attribute set set correctly to bind the LABEL to the FORM control, but since the LABEL element is opened PRIOR to the INPUT element, no labeling is available to the user - in my case (i use a screen-reader) the sub-forms that appear when one opens a FIELDSET to reveal a FORM appear unlabeled to my screenreader, because of invalid markup.
- close the
FIELDSET (which this form does)
Posted in Forms, WHATWG | 10 Comments »
Thursday, January 11th, 2007
I recently had an off-list email conversation with Ian Hickson about the possibility of adding URI Template support to the FORM element in WebForms 2.0. I've documented our conversation and my response to his suggestion to use server-side direct or Javascript instead over at the Well Designed URL Initiative blog. However, I've provided some examples of what I'm proposing below:
<form
action="http://foo.com/model"
template="http://foo.com/{make}/{model}/"
method="get">
<input type="text" name="make" />
<input type="text" name="mode" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>
<form
action="http://www.myblog.com/topic"
template="http://www.myblog.com/{topic}/"
method="post">
<select name="topic">
<option value="first">My 1st Post</option>
<option value="second">My 2nd Post</option>
<option value="third">My 3d Post</option>
</select>
<input type="text" name="comment">
<input type="submit">
</form>
<form
action="http://blog.whatwg.org/topic"
template="http://blog.whatwg.org/{topic}"
method="post">
<select name="topic">
<option value="feed-autodiscovery">
Feed Autodiscovery
</option>
<option value="text-content-checking">
textContent Checking
</option>
<option value="checker-bug-fixes">
Bug Fixes
</option>
<option
value="significant-inline-checking">
Significant Inline Checking
</option>
<option value="charmod-norm-checking">
Charmod Norm Checking
</option>
<option value="proposing-features">
Proposing features
</option>
</select>
<input type="submit">
</form>
One point I made on the WDUI blog that I also I want to make here is that is seems from my time on the REST-discuss list that many of the REST experts tend toward using (what I call well-designed URLs, i.e. URLs where the resource is identified by path instead of query string. With WebForm 2.0's pending support of PUT and DELETE, it would be just short of a crime not to include support for posting to clean URLs in WebForms 2.0.
So I really hope that Ian and the WHATWG can see their way clear to consider adding this feature to WebForms 2.0. And if the main issue with it is needing to have it written up for inclusion in the spec, I'm more than happy to help.
Posted in Forms | 9 Comments »