The point of my comments, though, was what I have been saying all along. You simply don't need additional structure to put a form on a page. All you need are the form-related elements: Form, fieldset, legend, label, input (varied), and textarea. Using these elements and CSS you can lay out a form and, if this done properly, it's good to go, semantic, valid, accessible, and actually fairly controllable. There is actually a lot one can do without having to introduce something like a list or table structure. Try clever floats, et. al.
For the most part your comments are correct - however the reality is that these alone will not allow for more complex presentation requirements. This becomes VERY apparent when dealing with errors... For instance, say I am required to indicate to a user that there is a problem with a particular field. More than just providing a list of errors, I wish to highlight each field visually (ideally semantically too) and display a useful help message indicating what the user has done wrong. Here is my label/input ONLY mark-up: <label id="label_email" for="field_email">Email Address <span class="required">*</span></label> <input type="text" id="field_email" name="email" /> How am I going to highlight the label input pair without a container div? A fieldset? But, its one field and field sets seem to indicate multiple related fields? If I put a background colour on a label, how does it appear? What about a background colour on the input itself? We try: <div class="labelInputPair"> <label id="label_email" for="field_email">Email Address <span class="required">*</span></label> <input type="text" id="field_email" name="email" /> <span class="errorMessage">Sorry, your email address was not valid. It should look something like [EMAIL PROTECTED]</div> </div> But... Where does the 'error message' go? Before or after the input? What about the semantics of this error message? What about the semantics of the required nature of the field in my business logic itself too, surely that might be nice for a screen reader user to know as well? Even if I add in container divs or spans to allow for additional presentation elements, the semantic value of them is still completely non-existent. Thats a limitation with HTML and XHTML, they simply don't allow for meaningful mark-up when it comes to form fields. At any rate, I hope you can see that people are really struggling with this stuff and for good reason. The standards are archaic and leave a lot to be desired. Karl ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
