Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
I hoped to see an example of an actual semantic improvement of introducing INPUT[type=SEARCH]. Maciej described a conceptual improvement for the ideal world; in the real world, the developers will have to use the heuristics anyway because there are search fields in the wild not marked as such and most of them will remain that way of course.
If HTML5 assumes user agents should rely on heuristics to detect Search fields, it should specify those heuristics (rather than forcing user-agents to reverse engineer them). Do you have an algorithm you would like to propose?
When it triggers a different interface and functionality in popular browsers, explicit markup is unlikely to be accidental and relying on explicit markup is preferable to heuristics alone. Hence the existence of semantic markup (heading elements, microformats, etc.).
-- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
