This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 8436 - "granularity that is expected (and required) of the value, by limiting the allowed values" -- granularity requirments may often be different for validation versus usability/ui-control purposes. There should be a 'step' for possible GUI controls and an oth
Summary: "granularity that is expected (and required) of the value, by limiting the al...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: LC
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-12-04 03:23 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2010-10-04 13:58 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description contributor 2009-12-04 03:23:24 UTC
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-step-attribute

Comment:
"granularity that is expected (and required) of the value, by limiting the allowed values" -- granularity requirments may often be different for validation versus usability/ui-control purposes. There should be a 'step' for possible GUI controls and an other 'granularity' for validation purposes.

Posted from: 91.55.215.102
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2010-01-06 04:47:34 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Could you describe the use case for this? Why would the UI allow more or less granularity than the submission format includes? Surely throwing away user data is a bad idea, and if the user didn't provide the data, we can't submit it. Doesn't this argue that they should be the same?
Comment 2 x.a 2010-01-10 15:27:05 UTC
Appreciate your comment.

Imagine using an 'input' with the 'type' attribute in 'Number' state in order to get a user input eg regarding the minutes part of a geographical location.

You may want to allow 10th or even 100th, so you specify attributes 'min="0"', 'max="59.99"' and 'step="0.01"', as the default step (and step scaling) are standardized to be 1.


So far, so fine. Maybe the issue is digging to deep into spheres of the UA and their decisions regarding an actual UI implementation. But you surely don't want to have a user have to click 100 times to adjust the entire value by just one minute!

It would be reasonable to use a 'granularity' for the UI controls to consider different from the 'granularity' used in the validation process. (In this example it might be a 1 minute 'controlstep', so to cover any case the UA/UI might appreciate a hint or a binding attribute value.) To exhaust the 'granularity' granted in the validation process, the user would have to type a value in.


As you point out, that only makes sense, if the 'controlstep' was coarser than the '(validation)step'.
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2010-02-06 00:34:53 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale:

In most user interfaces, the user can just type in the new value, they don't have to use the button. But in general, I think this is a UI issue  there's no reason the UI's buttons have to follow step=""'s value, they can be adjusted dynamically or be based on whether the user is holding a shift key, or whatnot. So I think we should let the browsers figure this out for now. If it turns out they need something, then we can add it later.