Jukka K. Korpela <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi>: > 2014-08-04 20:06, Christoph Päper wrote: > >> Imagine a text layout GUI made with HTML. >> It would probably feature a font size selection control. >> There are different ways to do such a thing: > > There are, and they are preferred in different ways by different people, as > programmers or as end users. This is why any solution, in addition to > introducing considerable complexity into HTML, would be used for a small > fraction of potential use cases only.
You do realize that font size control was just an example? A combined widget for number and unit would be useful in many places. Although most of us use metric units exclusively for almost all applications, there are still a lot of scenarios where two or more units are commonly used – even with the SI some may prefer centimetres over millimetres sometimes (or vice versa). Not to mention US localisation. > An addition to the ways mentioned, the font size control could be simply two > buttons, one for increasing and one for decreasing the size, (…) This seems like a special cased ‘numeric’ or ‘range’ widget and is agnostic of units. > The designer needs to decide the internal representation of the font size and > to map the alternatives in the UI to that. I don’t see how additions to HTML > would significantly help here, even if they happened to match the approach > that is selected by the designer. The point is that some such approaches are possible already, but not all. The simple possible solutions are rather clumsy and not very user-friendly. Every author could, of course, just parse all free user input from a ‘text’ input server-side, but why shouldn’t browsers sanitize such input like they do for other form controls?
