On 10/27/14, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote: > > On Fri, 24 Jan 2014, Jukka K. Korpela wrote: >> 2014-01-22 2:28, Ian Hickson wrote: >> > On Tue, 3 Dec 2013, Jukka K. Korpela wrote: >> > >
[...] >> 3. To determine if a form control is eligible for success (see below) >> `HTMLFormControl.isEnabled` > > What's the use case? > > Would an unchecked checkbox be considered "eligible" by this criteria? > That's irrelevant. Successful form controls, as defied in HTML4. [...] > > >> Disabling a fieldset disables its descendant controls but does not >> change their disabled property. Thus, a disabled fieldset's descendant >> controls won't succeed, however, its descendant controls' `disabled` >> property can be true. > > Yeah, the "disabled" property just reflects the disabled="" attribute. > > >> From what I understand, the word "disabled" it appears in HTML5 is >> overloaded to describe the following three different things: >> >> 1) The form control's disabled `property` * > > The spec prefers the term IDL attribute, but yes. > >> 2) The form control's disabled attribute (content attribute) ** >> >> 3) The form control's eligibility for success. *** > > Right. > > >> I propose changing one of these -- the last -- to the positive sense -- >> isEnabled, and exposing that in the DOM. Because it's not so useful to >> have a form whose disabled property is false but the form is "disabled" >> due to being a descendant of a disabled fieldset. > > What's the use case? > Need to know if a form control is enabled (and if it is, get its value). > Is it common enough that it's worth having a convenience API for it? (You > can always write a function to determine the state.) > Yes, it is very common. And it used to be as simple as:- element.disabled - but now that FIELDSET can be disabled, descendent elements are ineligible for success, yet `element.disabled` is true. A confounding yet glaring detail. It is not so common to disable a FIELDSET because:- 1) It is not widely supported. 2) it is not a commonly needed feature. But when it is needed, `fieldset.disabled` is simpler than looping through its descendant controls manually and setting their respective `disabled` property. But it also means any code that wants to determine if a form control is eligible for success -- and that control is not disabled -- must traverse up the document tree to see if that control is not within a FIELDSET that is disabled. Right? Instead, the code should be able to determine if the control is eligible for success, and this should be possible with a property check. Like isEnabled. To be feature complete, disable-ability of FIELDSET requires a simple way to determine if an element is eligible/enabled -- like element.isEnabled. -- Garrett @xkit ChordCycles.com garretts.github.io
