[pmwiki-users] Input recipe

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Sat Jun 25 07:37:47 CDT 2005


On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 03:13:08AM -0400, Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:
> [...]
> But then, if you're trying to make custom forms available to the great
> unwashed, then this is exactly the kind of problem they're going to
> have.
> 
> I wonder why HTML forms are so hard?

It's hard to create a simple markup for forms simply because there
are so many things that have to be specified.  Essentially a form
consists of a series of controls, for each control we need to be
able to specify 
   - the type of control (text line, radiobutton, checkbox, password, ...)
   - the way the control is rendered or displayed
   - the "name" of the control passed to the script
   - the default, initial, or activated value of the control

It's difficult to come up with a markup that is simultaneously
simple yet general enough to allow all of the above things to be
specified.  Most of the assumptions we've come up with thus far
that allow us to simplify the markup also greatly limit the scope of 
application that markup can be used for.

Pm



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