Benjamin Joffe wrote:
Have the following possible values for the TYPE attribute been
considered for the INPUT element?
type="color"
The user agent would display an appropriate colour picker and would send
a hexidecimal string represting that colour to the server.
I like this idea. It's simple and it's something I've implemented (and
seen implemented) dozens of times.
type="address"
Indicates that the input should represent an address, the user agent may
aid by displaying data from a GPS or use an online map etc.
I have a little more trouble with this idea, for a number of reasons:
* Address formats vary from region to region.
* Sites usually want items like the postal code, state, county or town
separated from the street address for various reasons. This is not
catered for by your proposal.
* To do anything special for this field beyond just displaying a big
text box some sort of external data source is required, but it is not at
all obvious what that data source would be or what a good UI for this
field type might be.
type="location"
Same as above but instead of sending an address string it would send
latitude/longitude information, this (as opposed to the above) would
send a well-formed string.
Perhaps coordinates/geocoordinates or something else would be a more
suitable name for the latter.
I have similar reservations about this one, but at least there is a more
obvious UI: mobile devices with built in GPS recievers could concievably
provide an option to fill in the current coordinates.
However, I'm not sure that submitting geographic coordinates is a common
enough case to warrant an input type of its own. Part of me wants to
generalize it to be type="2dvector" and type="3dvector", which can then
represent any 2D or 3D coordinates. I'm not really sure what a UA would
do to such a field that would be any more useful than two or three
type="text" elements, though.
