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This specification defines Web Forms 2.0, an extension to the forms features found in HTML 4.01's Forms chapter and the corresponding DOM 2 HTML interfaces. Web Forms 2.0 applies to both HTML and XHTML user agents. It provides new strongly-typed input fields, new attributes for defining constraints, a repeating model for declarative repeating of form sections, new DOM interfaces, new DOM events for validation and dependency tracking, and XML submission and initialization of forms. It also standardises and codifies existing practice in areas that have not been previously documented, and clarifies some of the interactions of HTML form controls and CSS.
HTML4, XHTML1.1, and the DOM are thus extended in a manner that has a clear migration path from existing HTML forms, leveraging the knowledge authors have built up with their experience with HTML so far.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.
This document is the result of a loose collaboration between interested parties in the context of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.
If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to whatwg@whatwg.org (archived public mailing list).
This document has reached a stable stage. The following are the only known open issues with this document:
form elements
to be inline-level if the form element is itself a
descendant of a block-level element. However, there is some debate about
whether this specification should exclude the div element
from the list of allowed ancestors.
validity
DOM attribute is not very clean, and may deserve to be replaced with
something that has been thought through with more care.
To find the latest version of this working draft, please follow the "Latest version" link above.
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input element
pattern attribute
required attribute
form attribute
autocomplete attribute
autofocus attribute
inputmode attribute
datalist element and the list attribute
output element
textarea element
form element
HTMLFormElement interface
HTMLSelectElement interface
HTMLDataListElement interface
HTMLOptionElement interface
HTMLFieldsetElement interface
HTMLOutputElement interface
HTMLInputElement interface
defaultValue DOM attribute
This is an update to the forms features found in HTML 4.01's Forms chapter, which are informally referred to as Web Forms 1.0.
Authors have long requested enhancements to HTML4 to support some of their more common needs. Such requests in mailing lists and other forums were examined, and from these sources a set of requirements and design goals were derived:
Not all the desired features have been included in this specification. Future versions may be introduced to address further needs.
This specification does not describe the complete behaviour of an HTML or XHTML user agent. Readers are expected to refer to the existing specifications for the definitions of features that this specification does not change.
This specification is limited specifically to incremental improvements to existing wide-spread technologies, namely HTML4 and the DOM, as implemented by browsers prevalent in 2004. It is also intended to be a small step, implementable without overwhelming effort.
Large sweeping changes or new markup languages are therefore out of scope for this specification.
This specification clarifies and extends the semantics put forth in [HTML4] for form controls and form submission. It is expected to be implemented in ordinary HTML user agents alongside existing forms technology, and indeed, some of the features described in this draft have been implemented by user agents as ad-hoc, non-standard extensions for many years due to strong market need.
This specification can also be viewed as an extension to [XHTML1]. In particular, some of the features added in this module only apply to XHTML documents; for example, features allowing mixed namespaces.
This specification clarifies and extends the semantics put forth in [DOM2HTML] for the form control interfaces. These extensions are expected to be implemented in HTML and XHTML user agents that support the DOM.
This section is aimed at XForms authors and implementors. If you do not plan to use XForms, you may prefer to skip ahead to the next section. Knowledge of XForms is not required to use Web Forms.
This specification is in no way aimed at replacing XForms 1.0 [XForms], nor is it a subset of XForms 1.0.
XForms 1.0 is well suited for describing business logic and data constraints. Web Forms 2.0 aims to simplify the task of transforming XForms 1.0 systems into documents that can be rendered on HTML Web browsers that do not support XForms.
In this transformation model, the XForms processor is a server-side process that converts XForms and XML Schema documents, according to the XForms specification, into HTML and Web Forms documents, which are then processed by the client side Web Forms processor, along with a style sheet for presentation.
The structured XML instance data stored on the server side (e.g. in a database) is converted by the XForms processor into name/value pairs that are then used by the UA to prefill the form. Submission follows the opposite path, with the UA generating name/value pairs and sending them to the XForms processor on the server, which converts them back into structured XML for storage or further processing.
In order to simplify this transformation process, this specification attempts to add some of the functionality of XForms with a minimum impact on the existing, widely implemented forms model. Where appropriate, backwards compatibility, ease of authoring, and ease of implementation have been given priority over theoretical purity.
The following features of XForms have not been addressed:
Many of the less-used features that XForms supports using declarative syntax are, in this specification, handled by using scripting. Some new interfaces are introduced to simplify some of the more tedious tasks.
This specification is unrelated to the XForms Basic profile.
A previous version of this draft was called "XForms Basic". This name has been changed so as to avoid confusion with the similarly named draft from the W3C.
This specification does not extend CSS, but it does clarify some of the interactions between HTML's form features and CSS.
This draft does not address all needs. In addition to the features of XForms that have not been addressed (see above), the following features were considered but rejected for this version of the specification:
Conformance to this specification is defined for user agents (UAs, implementations) and documents (authors, authoring tools, markup generators). Clauses specify whether they apply to user agents or documents.
User agents could include graphical Web browsers, voice-based mobile
devices, automated agents, content indexing robots, and inference tools.
In certain user agents, it may be impossible to determine whether a
particular conformance criteria is followed or not. For instance, whether
indexing robots mark the first option in a select element as
selected or not is not detectable. When it is impossible to tell if a UA
complies with a particular conformance requirement, that UA is exempt from
conforming to that requirement.
Authoring tools and markup generators are conformant if they only produce conformant documents.
As well as sections marked as non-normative, all diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. For readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification.
This specification includes by reference the form-related parts of the HTML4, XHTML1.1, DOM2 HTML, DOM3 Core, and DOM3 Events specifications ([HTML4], [XHTML1], [DOM2HTML], [DOM3CORE], [DOM3EVENTS]). Compliant UAs must implement all the requirements of those specifications to claim compliance with this one. Implementations may optionally implement only one of HTML4 and XHTML1.1.
Implementations that do not support scripting (or which have their scripting features disabled) are exempt from supporting the events and DOM interfaces mentioned in this specification. For the parts of this specification that are defined in terms of an events model or in terms of the DOM, such user agents must still act as if events and the DOM were supported.
Scripting can form an integral part of an application. User agents that do not support scripting, or that have scripting disabled, might be unable to fully convey the author's intent.
This specification introduces attributes for setting the maximum size or range of certain values. While user agents should support all possible values, there may be implementation-specific limits.
HTML documents that use the new features described in this specification
and that are served over HTTP must be sent as text/html and
must a DOCTYPE specific to this specification.
XML documents using elements from the XHTML namespace that use the new
features described in this specification and that are served over HTTP
must be sent using an XML MIME type such as application/xml
or application/xhtml+xml and must not be served as
text/html. [RFC3023]
These XML documents may contain a DOCTYPE if desired, but
this is not required.
Documents that use the new features described in this specification cannot be strictly conforming XHTML or HTML4 documents, since they contain features not defined in those specifications.
This specification refers to both HTML and XML attributes and DOM attributes, often in the same context. When it is not clear which is being referred to, they are referred to as content attributes for HTML and XML attributes, and DOM attributes for those from the DOM. Similarly, the term "properties" is used for both ECMAScript object properties and CSS properties. When these are ambiguous they are simply qualified as object properties and CSS properties respectively.
Generally, when the specification states that a feature applies to HTML or XHTML, it also includes the other. When a feature specifically only applies to one of the two languages, it is called out explicitly, as in:
Similarly,
formelements in XHTML may now be nested (this does not apply to HTML).
Unless otherwise stated, XML elements defined in this specification are
elements in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, and
attributes defined in this specification have no namespace.
The term form control refers to
input, output,
select, textarea and button
elements. It does not include form, label,
datalist, option or
fieldset elements.
Form controls are valid when they comply with
their constraints, and invalid when they don't.
This is distinct from whether form controls have their willValidate attribute set to true, which
relates to whether they will be validated, or whether they are successful, which relates to
whether they will be submitted.
The terms URI and IRI in normative contexts are used as defined by [RFC3986] and [RFC3987].
Vendor-specific proprietary extensions to this specification are strongly discouraged. Documents must not use such extensions, as doing so reduces interoperability and fragments the user base, allowing only users of specific user agents to access the content in question.
If extensions are needed, they should be done using XML, with elements or attributes from custom namespaces. The use of extensions must not contradict nor cause the non-conformance of functionality defined in the specification.
User agents must treat elements and attributes that they do not understand as semantically neutral; leaving them in the DOM (for DOM processors), and styling them according to CSS (for CSS processors), but not inferring any meaning from them.
At the heart of any form lies the form controls. This section describes how Web Forms 2.0 expands the traditional HTML form model to support new types and features.
This subsection is not normative.
One of the big additions to the Web Forms model introduced with this specification is primitive type and validity checking.
Authors can use these new features in various ways. To indicate that a
form control expects a particular type of input, authors can specify the
types using the type attribute:
<label>E-mail address: <input type="email" name="addr"></label> <label>Start date: <input type="date" name="start"></label>
To mark a field as required, the required attribute can be used:
<label>Quantity: <input type="number" required="required" name="qty"></label>
To set the range of values that are allowed, the min and max
attributes can be used:
<label>Meeting time: <input type="time" min="09:00" max="17:00" name="mt"></label>
Once such constraints have been specified, the user agent will automatically guide the user through any errors he may have made before allowing the form to be submitted.
Authors can hook into this validation system with their scripts. There are several ways to do this.
At any point, scripts can check a control's validity DOM attribute for up to date
information on whether a control is valid:
with (document.forms[0]) {
if (qty.validity.isRequired) {
// the quantity field is required but not filled in
} else if (qty.validity.isTypeMismatch) {
// the quantity field is filled in, but it is not a number
}
}
An author can explicitly set a control as being invalid ("invalid" means that the control's value is not acceptable):
var myControl = document.forms[0].addr;
if (myControl.value == 'a@b.c') {
myControl.setCustomValidity('You must enter your real address.');
}
Authors can also override the normal user agent error reporting
behaviour by hooking into the invalid
event:
<label>Home page: <input type="uri" name="hp" required="required"
oninvalid="alert('You must enter a valid home page address.'); return false;">
</label>
HTML input elements use the type attribute to
specify the data type. In [HTML4], the types (as
seen by the server) are as follows:
text
password
checkbox
radio
submit
file
image
hidden
In addition, HTML also provides a few alternate elements that convey typing semantics similar to the above types, but use different content models:
select
radio type.
select multiple
checkbox type.
textarea
button
submit type but with a richer content model.
The difference between the checkbox
and radio types and their
select and select multiple counterparts is that
for the select variants the values are only available through
a single composite control, whereas for the checkbox and radio types the controls representing each value
may be individually placed around the document.
There are also two button types (available on both input
and button elements) that are never submitted:
button and reset.
This specification includes all of these types, their semantics, and their processing rules, by reference, for backwards compatibility. Compliant UAs must follow all the guidelines given in the HTML4 specification except those modified by this specification.
These types are useful, but limited. This specification expands the list to cover more specific data types, and introduces attributes that are designed to constrain data entry or other aspects of the UA's behaviour.
In addition to the attributes described below,
some changes are made to the content model of HTML form elements to take
into account scripting needs. Specifically, the form, legend, select, and
optgroup elements may now be empty. However, with the
exception of the form element, authors should avoid allowing any of these
elements to be both empty and visible for any noticable period, as it is
likely to confuse users. In HTML4, those elements
always required at least one element child, or, in the case of
legend, at least one character of text.
Also, as controls no longer need to be
contained within their form element to be associated with
it, authors may prefer to declare their forms in advance, at the top of
their documents. The form element is therefore allowed in the
head element of XHTML documents, although only when the
form element is empty. (This does not apply to HTML, where a
<form> tag has always implied the end of any unclosed
head element and the beginning of the body.)
Similarly, form elements in XHTML
may now be nested (this does not apply to HTML, where a
<form> tag is interpreted by UAs as implying the end of
any unclosed form elements). Form controls by default
associate with their nearest form ancestor. Forms are not semantically
related to ancestor forms in any way, and do not share attributes or form
controls or events (except insofar as events bubble up the DOM).
The children of a form element must
be block-level elements, unless one of the ancestors of the
form element is a td, th,
li, dd, dt, or block-level element
other than div, in which case either block-level or
inline-level content is allowed (but not both). input
elements of type hidden may be placed
anywhere (both in inline contexts and block contexts).
The form and select elements are extended with
data attributes for fetching
values and options from external resources.
Radio buttons in sets where none of the buttons are marked as checked must all be initially left unchecked by the UA (which differs from the behavior described in [RFC1866], but more accurately represents common implementation and author needs). Authors are recommended to always have one radio button selected. Having no radio buttons selected is considered very poor UI.
Radio buttons in sets where more than one button is marked as checked must all be initially left unchecked by the UA except for the last radio button marked as checked. Each time a checked radio button is inserted into the document, the UA must uncheck all the other radio buttons in that set in the document.
Previous versions of Web Forms were
inconsistent about whether the first option element of a
single-select select element with no otherwise-selected items
should be automatically selected. According to [RFC1866], it should be, and according to [HTML4] it was undefined. User agents implementing
this specification must select the initial option element of
a single-select select element with no otherwise-selected
items.
The optgroup element may now be nested
inside other optgroup elements.
The label element's exact default presentation
and behaviour should match the platform's label behaviour. For example, on
platforms where clicking a checkbox label checks the checkbox, clicking a
label element must cause a click event to be
synthesised and fired at the checkbox. In any case, events targeted at
form controls within a label must not be handled by the label itself.
The first submit button in a form is the form's default button. If the platform supports submitting a form implicitly (for example, on some platforms hitting the "enter" key while a text field is focused implicitly submits the form), then when doing so the first submit button, this default button, must be the one used to initiate form submission (and it will therefore be successful). Consequently, if the default button is disabled, the form must not be submitted when such an implicit submission mechanism is used. If there is no submit button, then the implicit submission mechanism must submit the form as if there was an enabled, unnamed, default button.
input elementSeveral new values are introduced for the type attribute.
As with the older types, UAs are recommended to show specialized widgets
for these types, instead of requiring that the user enter the data into a
text field.
The formats described below are those that UAs must use in the DOM and when submitting the data. They do not necessarily represent what the user is expected to type. User agents are expected to show suitable user interfaces for each of these types (e.g. using the user's locale settings). It is the UA's responsibility to convert the user's input into the specified format.
For most of these types, min, max and step
attributes can be applied to restrict the range of numbers that apply.
datetime
step attribute specifies the precision in
seconds, defaulting to 60 (one minute).
User agents are expected to show an appropriate widget. UAs may display the time in whatever time zone is appropriate for the user, but should be clear to the user that the time is globally defined, not time-zone dependent. The submitted date and time must be in the UTC time zone.
datetime-local
step attribute specifies the precision in
seconds, defaulting to 60 (one minute).
date
step attribute specifies the precision
in days, defaulting to 1. User agents are expected to show an appropriate
widget, such as a datepicker.
month
step
attribute specifies the precision in months, defaulting to 1. This type
is used most frequently for credit card expiry dates.
week
step attribute specifies the precision in weeks,
defaulting to 1. This type is used most frequently for dates in European
industry.
time
step attribute specifies the precision
in seconds, defaulting to 60. Times must be greater than or equal to 0
and must be less than 24 hours, in addition to any tighter restrictions
placed on the field by the min and
max attributes. Note that this type is
not an elapsed time data type.
User agents are expected to show an appropriate widget, such as a clock. UAs should make it clear to the user that the time does not carry any time zone information.
number
A numerical value. The step attribute
specifies the precision, defaulting to 1.
Numbers must be submitted as a significand followed by an optional exponent. The significand is an optional minus sign (U+002D, "-"), an integer, and optionally a decimal point (U+002E, ".") and an integer representing the fractional part. The exponent is a lowercase literal letter "e", an optional minus sign, and an integer representing the index of a power of ten with which to multiply the significand to get the actual number. Integers are one or more decimal digits. If the exponent part is omitted it must be assumed to be zero.
For example, negative-root-two, to 32 significant figures, would be -1.4142135623730950488016887242097e0, the radius of the earth given in furlongs, to an arbitrary precision, would be 3.17e4, and the answer to the life, the universe and everything could be any of (amongst others) 42, 0042.000, 42e0, 4.2e1, or 420e-1.
This format is designed to be compatible with scanf(3)'s
%f format, ECMAScript's parseFloat, and
similar parsers while being easier to parse than some other floating
point syntaxes that are also compatible with those parsers.
The strings +0, 0e+0 and +1e+3
are all invalid numbers (the minus sign cannot be replaced by a plus
sign for positive numbers, it must simply be omitted). UAs must not
submit numbers in invalid formats (whatever the user might enter).
The submission format is not intended to be the format seen and used by users. UAs may use whatever format and UI is appropriate for user interaction; the description above is simply the submission format.
range
Same as number, but indicates that
the exact value is not important, letting UAs provide a simpler
interface than they do for number.
For instance, visual UAs may use a slider control. The step, min, and
max attributes still apply. For this
type, step defaults to 1, min defaults to 0, max defaults to 100, and value
defaults to the min value.
Volume controls and brightness controls would be good examples of "range" data controls.
email
addr-spec
token defined in RFC 2822 section 3.4.1 [RFC2822], but excluding the CFWS
subtoken everywhere, and excluding the FWS subtoken
everywhere except in the quoted-string subtoken. UAs could,
for example, offer e-mail addresses from the user's address book. (See
below for notes on IDN.)uri
IRI token, defined in RFC 3987 section 2.2). UAs could, for
example, offer the user URIs from his bookmarks. (See below for notes on IDN.)The email and uri fields may contain IDN domains. [RFC3490] These should be sent in their original
character set, not IDNA-encoded. (Authors can use the pattern
pattern="[\x00-\x7F]+" to
indicate that only ASCII-based domain names must be allowed.)
By default, all of these new types (except range), just like the types from HTML4, must have
no value selected unless a default value in a valid format is provided
using the value attribute. If a value is specified but it is
not in a value that is valid for the type (where the valid types are the
same as the valid submission types described above) then the
defaultValue DOM attribute has the specified value, but the
control is left blank.
Empty fields (those with no value) do not need to match their type. (Although if they are required fields, they will stop submission for that reason instead.)
The following form uses some of the types described above:
<form action="..." method="post" onsubmit="verify(event)">
<p>
<label>
Quantity:
<input name="count" type="number" min="0" max="99" value="1" />
</label>
</p>
<p>
<label for="time1"> Preferred delivery time: </label>
<input id="time1" name="time1" type="time" min="08:00" max="17:00" value="08:00" /> —
<input id="time2" name="time2" type="time" min="08:00" max="17:00" value="17:00" />
</p>
<script type="text/javascript">
function verify(event) {
// check that time1 is smaller than time2, otherwise, swap them
if (event.target.time1.value >= event.target.time2.value) { // ISO 8601 times are string-comparison safe.
var time2Value = event.target.time2.value;
event.target.time2.value = event.target.time1.value;
event.target.time1.value = time2Value;
}
}
</script>
</form>
Servers should still perform type-checking on submitted data, as malicious users or rogue user agents might submit data intended to bypass this client-side type-checking. Validation done via script may also be easily bypassed if the user has disabled scripting. Additionally, legacy user agents do not support the validation features described in this specification and will therefore submit data that has not been checked.
The size attribute of the
input element is deprecated in favor of using CSS to specify
the layout of the form.
To limit the range of values allowed by some of the above types, two new attributes are introduced, which apply to the date-related, time-related, numeric, and file upload types:
min
ERROR_RANGE_UNDERFLOW). If absent,
or if the minimum value is not in exactly the expected format, there is
no minimum restriction, except for the range and file
types, where the default is zero.
max
ERROR_RANGE_OVERFLOW). If absent,
or if the maximum value is not in exactly the expected format, there is
no maximum restriction (beyond those intrinsic to the type), except for
the range type, where the default is
100, and the file type, where the
default is 1.
For date, time and numeric fields, the values indicate the allowed range. For file upload fields, the values indicate the allowed number of files.
The ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH
code is used for fields whose values do not match their types, and the
ERROR_RANGE_UNDERFLOW and
ERROR_RANGE_OVERFLOW codes
are used for fields whose values are outside the allowed range.
A field with a max less than its
min can never be satisfied when it has a
value (since that value will always be either underflow or overflow the
allowed range) and thus in such cases must block a form from being
submitted. This does not make the document non-conformant.
The exact values allowed by min and
max depend on the type
attribute. For numeric types (number
and range) the value must exactly match
the number type described above. For file types it must be a sequence of digits 0-9,
treated as a base ten integer. For date and time types it must match the
relevant format mentioned for that type, all fields having the right
number of digits, with the right separating punctuation.
For example, 50.00 does not match the allowed value of
time, so the following control has no
artificial restrictions on its values:
<input type="time" min="50.00">
Similarly, the value 2000 is not a valid value for
datetime, date, or any of the other date or time types.
The following cases would work, though;
<input type="time" min="22:00"> <input type="time" min="22:00:50.0001">
The step attribute controls the
precision allowed for the date-related, time-related, and numeric types.
For the control to be valid, the control's value must be an integral
number of steps from the min value, or, if
there is no min attribute, the max value, or if there is neither attribute, from
zero.
The zero point for datetime
controls is 1970-01-01T00:00:00.0Z, for datetime-local is 1970-01-01T00:00:00.0,
for date controls is 1970-01-01, for
month controls is 1970-01, for week controls is 1970-W01 (the week starting
1969-12-29 and containing 1970-01-01), and for time controls is 00:00.
For time controls, the value is in seconds, although it may be a
fractional number as well to allow fractional times. The format is the number format described above, except that the value
must be greater than zero. The default value for datetime, datetime-local and time controls is 60 (one minute).
For the following control, the allowed values are any day of any year, with the times restricted to even minutes:
<input type="datetime" step="120" name="start">
For the following control, the allowed values are fifteen seconds and two tenths of a second past the minute, any minute of the day, i.e. 00:00:15.2, 00:01:15.2, 00:02:15.2 ... 23:59:15.2:
<input type="time" min="00:00:15.20" name="t">
This is because the default step for
time controls is 60 (one minute).
How the step attribute affects the UI
is not defined by this specification. For example, for a datetime control with step="1",
the UI could look like this:
For date controls, the value is in days, weeks, or months, for the
date, week, and month
types respectively. The format is a non-negative integer; one or more
digits 0-9 interpreted as base ten. If the step is zero, it is interpreted
as the default. The default for these control types is 1.
The following control would only allow selection of any Sunday in any year from 1900 onward:
<input type="date" min="1900-01-07" step="7" name="sunday">
For numeric controls (number and
range), the format of the step attribute is the number
format described above, except that the value must be greater than
zero. The default value is 1.
If the step is 25e-2 (or 0.25, which is
equivalent), and if max is
-1.1, then the allowed values would be -1.1, -1.35, -1.60,
-1.85, -2.1, ...
In addition, for any of the types, the literal value any may be used. This keyword
indicates that any value may be used (within the bounds of other
restrictions placed on the field).
The following control would allow any floating point number:
<input type="number" step="any" name="n">
The ERROR_STEP_MISMATCH
code is used for fields whose values are not one of the values allowed by
the step attribute. However, UAs may
silently round the number to the nearest allowed value instead of
reporting a validation error.
If the author specified step is too small for the UA to handle (for
example, 1e-9999999 would probably underflow most
implementations) then the UA should treat the value as any. If the given step value is not one of the allowed values, then
the default is used.
User agents are recommended to never convert user- and author-supplied values to their binary numeric representation, keeping the values in string form at all times and performing comparisons in that form. This ensures that UAs are able to handle arbitrarily large numbers without risking data loss due to rounding in the decimal-to-binary conversion.
If a UA needs to round a number to its nearest binary equivalent, as, for example, when converting a user-supplied decimal number and an author-supplied minimum in order to compare them to establish validity (ignoring the suggestion above to do these comparisons in string form), algorithms equivalent to those specified in ECMA262 sections 9.3.1 ("ToNumber Applied to the String Type") and 8.5 ("The Number type") should be used (possibly after suitably altering the algorithms to handle numbers of the range that the UA can support). [ECMA262]
In addition to the new attributes given in this section, some existing attributes from [HTML4] are clarified and extended below. These, and other attributes from HTML4, continue having the same semantics as described in HTML4 unless specified otherwise.
accesskey
UAs may now support the accesskey attribute on select
elements (and must at a minimum support the relevant DOM attribute).
The accesskey attribute on
label elements must act the same way as it would if
specified on the associated element directly.
disabled
The disabled attribute applies to
all form controls except the output
element, and also to the fieldset element. In HTML4 the disabled
attribute did not apply to the fieldset element.
When applied to a fieldset element it overrides the
disabled attributes of any
descendent form controls (regardless of whether they are associated with
the same form). In other words, a form control shall be disabled if it
has its disabled attribute set, or
if any of its ancestor fieldset elements have
their disabled attribute
set.
maxlength
This attribute applies to text,
password, uri, email
and file input types, and
textarea elements. In particular, it does not apply to the
date-related, time-related, and numeric field types. In HTML4, this attribute only applied to the text and password types.
For text input controls it specifies the maximum length of the input, in terms of numbers of characters. For details on counting string lengths, see [CHARMOD].
A newline in a textarea's
value must count as two characters for maxlength processing (because newlines in
textareas are submitted
as U+000D U+000A). This includes the implied newlines that are added
for submission when the wrap attribute
has the value hard.
Authors are discouraged from using maxlength on uri and email fields
unless the server side processor actually has a limit on the size of
data fields it can usefully process. Valid URIs and e-mail addresses in
particular can often be surprisingly long.
When specified on a file upload control, it specifies the maximum size in bytes of each file (not the maximum size of the sum of all the files).
The ERROR_TOO_LONG code is
used when this attribute is specified on a text, password, uri, email
or textarea control and the control has more than the
specified number of characters, or when it is specified on a file control and at least one of the selected
files is longer than the specified number of bytes.
Servers should still expect to receive, and must be able to cope with,
content larger than allowed by the maxlength attribute, in order to deal with
malicious or non-conforming clients.
This attribute must not affect the initial value (the DOM
defaultValue attribute). It must only affect what the user
may enter and whether a validity error is flagged during validation.
If the maxlength attribute has
a value that is less than the length required for a valid value of the
given type, for example:
<input type="email" maxlength="1" name="test"/>
...then the control can only be valid if it is empty (unless, of
course, it is a required field,
in which case it can never be valid).
name
Ecom_") are
reserved by [RFC3106]. Authors must not use
names starting with the string "Ecom_" in ways that conflict
with RFC3106.
readonly
text,
password, email, uri, date-related, time-related, and number input types, as well as the
textarea element. Specifically, it does not apply to radio
buttons, checkboxes, file upload fields, range controls, select elements, or
any of the button types; the interface concept of "readonly" values does
not apply to button-like interfaces. (The DOM readonly attribute ([DOM2HTML]) obviously applies to the same set of
types as the HTML attribute.)
Other attributes not listed in this specification retain the same semantics as in [HTML4].
pattern attributeFor the text, password, email, and uri types of the input element, and
for the textarea element, the pattern attribute specifies a pattern that
the control value must match.
When specified, the pattern
attribute contains a regular expression that the field's value must match
before the form may be submitted (ERROR_PATTERN_MISMATCH).
<label> Credit Card Number:
<input type="text" pattern="[0-9]{13-16}" name="cc" />
</label>
The regular expression language used for this attribute is the same as
that defined in [ECMA262], except that the
pattern attribute implies a
^ at the start of the pattern and a $ at the end
(so the pattern must match the entire value, not just any subset). The
pattern must be compiled with the global,
ignoreCase, and multiline flags disabled (see
ECMA262, sections 15.10.7.2 through 15.10.7.4). If the attribute is
omitted then
the control has no pattern restriction.
The implicit ^ and $ characters are inserted
because it is expected that the overwhelming majority of use cases will
be to require that user input exactly match the given pattern. Authors
who forget that these characters are implied will immediately realise
their mistake during testing. Had the characters not been implied,
requiring most authors to insert them themselves, it is likely that
authors who forgot them would not catch their mistake as easily.
Authors who wish to allow for any input so long as a particular string
occurs somewhere in the input should put .* at the
start and end of their pattern. If the input is expected to allow
newlines, then [\x000000-\x10FFFF]* or [\s\S]*
or some equivalent should be used instead, since the dot character in
JavaScript regular expressions does not include newlines.
The / character is not special in the pattern attribute. The two attributes
pattern="/etc/.+" and pattern="\/etc\/.+" are
therefore equivalent.
The ^ and $ characters have their usual
meaning. Thus, using the ^ character anywhere other than at
the start of the pattern, or the $ character anywhere other
than at the end of the pattern, prevents the pattern from matching
anything (unless the characters are escaped or part of a range).
In the case of the email and uri types, the pattern attribute specifies a pattern that must
be matched in addition to the value matching the generic pattern
relevant for the field. If the pattern given by the attribute specifies a
pattern that is incompatible with the grammar of the field type, as in the
example below, then the field could never be satisfied. (A document
containing such a situation is not technically non-conformant, but it is
of dubious semantic use.)
<form> <p> This form could never be submitted, as the following required field can never be satisfied: <input type="uri" pattern="[^:]+" required="required" name="test"/> </p> </form>
When the value doesn't match the field's type, an ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH error occurs;
when the value doesn't match the pattern, an ERROR_PATTERN_MISMATCH error
occurs. If the value matches neither the field's type nor the field's
pattern, both errors should be set.
When the pattern is not a valid regular expression, it is ignored for the purposes of validation, as if it wasn't specified.
Empty fields (those with no value) do not need to match their pattern. (Although if they are required fields, they will stop submission for that reason anyway.)
If the pattern attribute is present
but empty, it doesn't match any value, and the ERROR_PATTERN_MISMATCH flag shall
be set whenever the field isn't empty.
Authors should include a description of the pattern in the
title attribute. User agents may use the contents of this
attribute when informing the user that the pattern is not matched, or at
any other suitable time, such as in a tooltip or read out by assistive
technology when the control gains focus.
For example, the following snippet:
<label> Part number:
<input pattern="[0-9][A-Z]{3}" name="part"
title="A part number is a digit followed by three uppercase letters."/>
</label>
...could cause the UA to display an alert such as:
A part number is a digit followed by three uppercase letters.
You cannot complete this form until the field is correct.
When a control has a pattern
attribute, the title attribute, if used, must describe the
pattern. Additional information could also be included, so long as it
assists the user in entering the field. Otherwise, assistive technology
would be impaired.
For instance, if the title attribute contained the caption of the control, assistive technology could end up saying something like The text you have entered does not match the required pattern. Birthday, which is not useful.
UAs may still show the title in non-error situations (for
example, as a tooltip when hovering over the control), so authors should
be careful not to word titles as if an error has necessarily
occurred.
required attributeForm controls can have the required attribute specified, to
indicate that the user must enter a value into the form control before
submitting the form.
The required attribute applies to
all form controls except controls with the type hidden, image inputs, buttons (submit, move-up, etc), and select and
output elements. It can be
used on controls with the readonly
attribute set; this may be useful in scripted environments. For disabled
controls, the attribute has no effect.
The ERROR_REQUIRED code is
used for form controls marked as required that do not have values.
For checkboxes, the required
attribute shall only be satisfied when the checkbox is checked.
For radio buttons, the required
attribute shall only be satisfied when exactly one of the radio buttons in
that radio group is checked.
For file upload controls,
the required attribute shall only be
satisfied if at least one valid file is selected, regardless of the
min and max attributes.
Here is a form fragment showing one required field and one optional field. A user agent would not allow the user to submit the form until the "name" field was filled in.
<ul> <li>Name: <input type="text" name="name" required="required" /></li> <li>Comment: <input type="text" name="comment" /></li> </ul>
Any non-empty value satisfies the required condition, including a simple
whitespace character.
form attributeAll form controls as well as the fieldset element can have
the form attribute specified. The form attribute
gives a space-separated list of IDs of form elements that the
form control is to be associated with, and overrides the relationship
between the form control and any ancestor form element.
Any of the IDs in the space-separated list that do not identify an
element in the document, or that identify an element that is not an HTML
form element, must be ignored. Setting an element's
form attribute to the empty string (or to a string consisting
only of IDs that do not correctly identify form elements)
just disassociates the form control from its form, leaving it unassociated
with any form.
When set on a fieldset element, this attribute changes the
association of any descendent form controls, unless they have
form attributes of their own or are contained inside forms
that are themselves descendants of the fieldset element.
In other words, form controls must be
associated with the forms given in their form attribute, or, if they don't have one, must
be associated with the nearest ancestor form element or the
forms given in the form attribute of the nearest
fieldset element with a form attribute, whichever is the nearest. If none
of those apply, the form control is not associated with any form.
When forms are submitted, are reset, or have their form controls enumerated through the DOM, only those controls associated with the form are taken into account. A control can be associated with more than one form at a time.
A form attribute that specifies an ID that occurs multiple
times in a document should select the same form as would be selected by
the getElementById() method for that ID ([DOM3CORE]). (That is, the exact behaviour is
undefined, but must be the same as if the getElementById()
method was used.)
If a form is specified multiple times in the form
attribute, all occurrences but the first are ignored. (An element can only
be associated with a form once.)
In this example, each row contains one form. Without the "form" attribute, it would not be possible to have more than one form per table if any of them spanned cells.
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Value</th>
<th>Action</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<form id="edit1" action="/edit" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="id" value="1"/>
<input type="text" name="name" value="First Row"/>
</form>
</td>
<td>
<input form="edit1" type="text" name="value"/>
</td>
<td>
<input form="edit1" type="submit" name="Edit"/>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<form id="edit2" action="/edit" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="id" value="2"/>
<input type="text" name="name" value="Second Row"/>
</form>
</td>
<td>
<input form="edit2" type="text" name="value"/>
</td>
<td>
<input form="edit2" type="submit" name="Edit"/>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
In the following example, the text control is associated with two forms.
<form action="test.cgi"> <input type="text" name="q" form="fg fy"> <input type="submit" name="t" value="Test"> </form> <form id="fg" action="google.cgi"><input type="submit" value="Google"></form> <form id="fy" action="yahoo.cgi"><input type="submit" value="Yahoo"></form>
There are three submit buttons. The first, "Test", submits just the
"Test" button, and submits it to test.cgi. The text field is
not submitted with that form in Web Forms 2 compliant UAs. (It
is submitted in legacy UAs, which can be used for implementing
fallback behaviour.)
The second button submits the text field to google.cgi,
the third button submits the same text field to yahoo.cgi.
autocomplete attributeThe autocomplete attribute
applies to the text, password, select,
textarea, date-related, time-related, numeric, email, and uri
controls. The attribute takes two values, on and
off. The default, when the attribute is not specified, is
on.
The on value means the UA may store the value entered by the user so that if the user returns to the page, the UA can prefill the form. The off value means that the UA must not remember that field's value.
This specification does not define the autocompletion mechanism. UAs may implement any system within the conformance criteria of this specification, taking into account security and privacy concerns.
A UA may allow the user to disable support for this attribute. Support for the attribute must be enabled by default, and the ability to disable support should not be trivially accessible, as there are significant security implications for the user if support for this attribute is disabled.
Banks frequently do not want UAs to prefill login information:
<p>Account: <input type="text" name="ac" autocomplete="off" /></p> <p>PIN: <input type="text" name="pin" autocomplete="off" /></p>
In practice, this attribute is required by many banking institutions, who insist that UAs with auto-complete features implement it before supporting them on their Web sites. For this reason, it is implemented by most major Web browsers already, and has been for many years.
autofocus attributeAny form control (except hidden and
output controls) can have an autofocus attribute specified.
When a form control is inserted into a document, the UA must check to
see if it has this attribute set. If it does, and the control is not
disabled, and it is of a type
normally focusable in the user's operating environment, then the UA should
focus the control, as if the control's focus() method was
invoked. UAs with a viewport should also scroll the document enough to
make the control visible, even if it is not of a type normally focusable.
Authors should avoid setting the autofocus attribute on multiple enabled
elements in a document. If multiple elements with the autofocus attribute set are
inserted into a document, each one will be processed as described above,
as they are inserted. This means that during document load, for example,
the last focusable form control in document order with the attribute set
will end up with the focus.
UAs may ignore this attribute if the user has indicated (for example, by starting to type in a form control) that he does not wish focus to be changed.
The value of the attribute, if set, should be autofocus. The autofocus DOM attribute is true when the
attribute is present (regardless of its value, even if it is the empty
string), and false when it is absent. Setting the DOM attribute to true
sets the content attribute to the value autofocus.
Setting the DOM attribute to false removes the content attribute.
In the following snippet, the text field would be focused when the document was loaded.
<input maxlength="256" name="q" value="" autofocus="autofocus"> <input type="submit" value="Search">
In HTML, the minimised form may be used (just autofocus instead of
autofocus="autofocus").
Focusing the control does not imply that the UA must focus the browser window if it has lost focus.
inputmode attributeThe inputmode attribute applies
to the input element when it has a type
attribute of text, password, email, or uri, and to the textarea element.
This attribute is defined to be exactly equivalent to the inputmode attribute defined in the XForms 1.0
specification (sections E1 through E3.2) [XForms].
datalist element and the list attributeFor the text, email, uri, date-related, time-related, and numeric types
of the input element, a new attribute list is introduced to point to a list of
values that the UA should offer to the user in addition to allowing the
user to pick an arbitrary value.
To complement the new list attribute, a
datalist element is introduced. This
element has two roles: it provides a list of data values, in the form of a
list of option elements, and it may be used to provide
fallback content for user agents that do not support this specification.
If the UA supports this element, it should not be displayed. In CSS-aware user agents, this should be achieved by including the following rules, or their equivalent, in the UA's user agent stylesheet:
@namespace xh url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
xh|datalist { display: none; }
When a control has a list attribute, it
specifies an element from which to derive the list of author-specified
autocompletion values for the control.
The element specified is the one that would be returned when calling
getElementById() with the value of the list attribute as the argument, if the returned
value is an element node with either the tag name datalist or the tag name select,
and (for XHTML) with the XHTML namespace. If the attribute is present but
either specifies an ID that is not in the document, or specifies an
element that is not an (X)HTML datalist or select, then it must
be ignored.
The list of autocompletion values shall be given by the list of elements
that would be found by calling getElementsByTagName() with
the tag name option on the element specified, if any (or, in
XHTML documents, the list of elements that would be found by calling
getElementsByTagNameNS() with the same tag name and
the XHTML namespace).
For each element in this list, if the element is not marked as disabled, the autocompletion value is either
the value of its value content attribute, or, if that
attribute is absent, the value of its text DOM attribute. The UA may use the
label attribute to annotate the value in its interface. If
the element is marked as disabled, if
the autocompletion value is the empty string, or if the autocompletion
value is not a valid value for the control's type (for example,
20 is not a valid value for a datetime control) then it must be ignored.
The author-specified list of predefined values may be augmented by the UA's own autocompletion logic. For example, the UA may remember previous values that the user has entered.
Authors must only use empty option elements or elements
that would be allowed in the datalist
element's parent as children of datalist elements. datalist elements may be used wherever
block-level elements are allowed and wherever select elements
are allowed.
Controls inside datalist elements
must never be successful. (They must still,
however, be associated with their
form.)
The datalist element may be
prefilled from an external file with the data attribute.
The selected attribute and the form,
selected, defaultSelected, and
index DOM attributes on option elements must
have no effect on the input and datalist elements when option
elements are used in this context.
If a document contained the following markup:
<input type="uri" name="location" list="uris"> <datalist id="uris"> <option label="MIME: Format of Internet Message Bodies" value="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045"> <option label="HTML 4.01 Specification" value="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/"> <option label="Form Controls" value="http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/slice8.html#ui-commonelems-hint"> <option label="Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification" value="http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/"> <option label="Feature Sets - SVG 1.1 - 20030114" value="http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/feature.html"> <option label="The Single UNIX Specification, Version 3" value="http://www.unix-systems.org/version3/"> </datalist>
...and the user had typed "www.w3", and the user agent had
also found that the user had visited
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/#membership and
http://www.w3.org/TR/XForms/ in the recent past, then the
rendering might look like this:
The first four URIs in this sample consist of the four URIs in the author-specified list that match the text the user has entered, sorted lexically. Note how the UA is using the knowledge that the values are URIs to allow the user to omit the scheme part and perform intelligent matching on the domain name.
The last two URIs (and probably many more, given the scrollbar's indications of more values being available) are the matches from the user agent's session history data. This data is not made available to the page DOM. In this particular case, the UA has no titles to provide for those values.
This example demonstrates how to design a form that uses the autocompletion list feature while still degrading usefully in legacy user agents.
If the autocompletion list is merely an aid, and is not important to
the content, then simply using a datalist element with children
option elements is enough. To prevent the values from being
rendered in legacy user agents, they should be placed inside the
value attribute instead of inline.
<p> <label> Enter a breed: <input type="text" name="breed" data="breeds"> <datalist id="breeds"> <option value="Abyssinian"> <option value="Alpaca"> <!-- ... --> </datalist> </label> </p>
However, if the values need to be shown in legacy UAs, then fallback
content can be placed inside the datalist element, as follows:
<p>
<label>
Enter a breed:
<input type="text" name="breed" data="breeds">
</label>
<datalist id="breeds">
<label>
or select one from the list:
<select name="breed">
<option value=""> (none selected)
<option>Abyssinian
<option>Alpaca
<!-- ... -->
</select>
</label>
</datalist>
</p>
The fallback content will only be shown in UAs that don't support
datalist. The options, on the other
hand, will be detected by all UAs, even though they are not direct
children of the datalist element.
Note that if an option element used in a datalist is selected, it will be
selected by default by legacy UAs (because it affects the
select), but it will not have any effect on the
input element in UAs that support datalist.
Here is another example, this time with a range control. The following markup fragment:
<input type="range" min="-100" max="100" value="0" step="10" name="power" list="powers"> <datalist id="powers"> <option value="0"> <option value="-30"> <option value="30"> <option value="+50"> </datalist>
...with the following stylesheet applied:
input { height: 75px; width: 49px; background: #D5CCBB; color: black; }
...might render as:
Note how the UA determined the orientation of the control from the
ratio of the stylesheet-specified height and width properties. The
colours were similiarly derived from the stylesheet. The tick marks,
however, were derived from the markup. In particular, the step attribute has not affected the placement of
tick marks, the UA deciding to only use the author-specified completion
values and then adding longer tick marks at the extremes.
Note also how the invalid value +50 was completely
ignored.
This specification does not mandate a particular interface. The UA could have used a rotary control, a combo box, a voice-driven text box, or any other widget or interface while still being compliant with this specification.
output elementThe output element acts very much
like a span element, except that it is considered to be a
form control for the purposes of the DOM. Its namespace (in XML) is the
same as for the other form control elements,
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml.
The output element may have any of
the common
attributes, the form and name attributes, the for attribute (defined below), and the
onchange, onforminput and
onformchange attributes.
Its current value is given by its contents, which may be any inline
content (like the span element).
The current value can be set and retrieved dynamically using the mutable
value DOM attribute of type DOMString. This
attribute is defined to be identical to the DOM3 Core
textContent attribute. [DOM3CORE]
The initial value of the output control is stored in a mutable
defaultValue DOM attribute of type DOMString.
See [HTML4] section 17.2 for the
definiton of the term "initial value". (In brief, it is the value used
when the form is reset.)
The defaultValue DOM attribute of
an output control is initially set to
the empty string. If an output element
is added to the document at parse time, its defaultValue DOM
attribute is set to the value of its textContent attribute
after all its children nodes were parsed. (If the value of
defaultValue is queried before the entire element's contents
have been parsed, or if the element was created dynamically (as opposed to
being inserted into the DOM by the UA's parser), then
defaultValue returns the empty string.)
The output element is never successful for form submission. Resetting a form
does reset its output
elements (using the defaultValue DOM attribute — note
that if the element originally contained elements as children, they will
be removed when the form is reset).
Unless the value attribute is directly
manipulated or the form is reset, elements that are children of the
output element when the document was
parsed are not flattened away.
The following example shows two input fields. Changing either field
updates an output element containing
the product of both fields.
<form> <p> <input name="a" type="number" step="any" value="0"> * <input name="b" type="number" step="any" value="0"> = <output name="result" onforminput="value = a.value * b.value">0</output> </p> </form>
This would work something like the following:
The forminput event
is defined in the section on new events.
Authors may provide a list of space-separated IDs in a for attribute that represents the list of
elements that control the value of the output element. User agents may use this list
to suggest to users the relevant parts of the document with which the user
should interact to change the value.
In the following example, the output element is used to indicate the
relationship between the given value and the later prose. The number
cannot be changed directly by the user, but the specified element
describes the process through which the user could change the value.
... <p>Your fax number is <output for="fax"><em>+1</em> 650 555 1234</output>.</p> ... <p id="fax">To change your fax number, you must send us a fax from your new number with a signed request that your fax number details be changed. We will then call you to confirm the change.</p>
Note the em element in the markup emphasising a part of
the number. Markup like this is allowed inside output elements.
Whenever the value attribute changes (whether directly or
because the DOM under the element was mutated), a change
event is fired on the output element.
The onchange attribute can therefore be used with this
element, in the same way as for other form controls.
textarea elementThe rows and cols attributes of the
textarea element are no longer required attributes. When
unspecified, CSS-compliant browsers should lay the element out as
specified by CSS, and non-CSS UAs may use UA-specific defaults, such as,
for visual UAs, using the available width on the page and a height
suitable for the device.
The textarea element may have a wrap attribute specified. This attribute
controls the wrapping behaviour of submitted text.
soft
hard
cols attribute. (These additional line breaks can't be seen
in the DOM.)
Authors should always specify a cols attribute when the
wrap attribute is set to hard. When wrap="hard" is specified
without a cols attribute, user agents should use the display
width when wrapping the text for submission. This will typically mean that
different users submit text at different wrapping widths, defeating much
of the purpose of client-side wrapping.
CSS UAs should render textarea elements as
specified by the 'white-space' property, although UAs may
have rules in their UA stylesheet that set the default 'white-space'
property values based on the wrap element
for textarea elements.
A newline in a textarea
submission must be delimited by the two characters U+000D U+000A (CRLF).
This includes the implied newlines that are added for submission when the
wrap attribute has the value hard. This also affects how newlines are handled for the
maxlength attribute, which applies to
textarea controls.
Authors may include an accept
attribute on textarea elements to indicate the type of
content expected. User agents may use this attribute to provide more
appropriate editors, syntax highlighting, spelling checkers, etc. The
value of the attribute must be a single text-based MIME type (for example,
text/plain, message/news,
image/svg+xml). The default, if the attribute is omitted or
if the value is not recognised by the UA, shall be
text/plain. [RFC2046]
The min and max attributes apply to file upload controls
(input elements of type file) and specify (using non-negative
integers) how many files must be attached for the control to be valid.
They default to 0 and 1 respectively (and so limit the default number of
files to 1 optional file, as per most existing implementations in early
2004). The defaults are used when the attributes are omitted or have
non-integer or negative integer values. The ERROR_RANGE_UNDERFLOW and ERROR_RANGE_OVERFLOW codes are used
to indicate when fields do not have the specified number of files
selected.
There is currently no way to specify that an unlimited
number of files may be uploaded. Authors are encouraged to consider what
the practical limit actually is for their server-side script. For example,
if the server uses an unsigned 16 bit integer to track file uploads, a
suitable max value would be
65536.
The required attribute applies to
file upload controls; it is only satisfied when at least one valid file
(that is, one that will actually be uploaded if the form is submitted) is
selected, irrespective of the min and
max attributes.
Non-existent files and files the UA won't be able to upload (for
whatever reason), when specified in file upload controls, do not count
towards the number of files selected for the purposes of min and max, and
are not submitted. It is recommended that user agents report problems of
this nature to the user. There is no way for scripts to detect this
situation because that would open the way for some privacy or security
leaks.
The maxlength attribute applies to
file upload controls. It specifies the maximum size, in bytes, of each
file.
The accept attribute may be used to
specify a comma-separated list of content types that a server processing
the form will handle correctly. [RFC2046] This
attribute was specified in HTML4. [HTML4] In this
specification, this attribute is extended as follows:
*, for example:
<input type="file" name="avatar" accept="image/*"/>In this way, the
accept attribute may
be used to specify that the server is expecting (say) images or sound
clips, without specifying the exact list of types.
accept attribute's
MIME type list to determine which application to use.
One recent use for sound file upload has been the concept of audio blogging. This is similar to straight-forward Web logging, or diary writing, but instead of submitting textual entries, one submits sound bites.
The submission interface to such a system could be written as follows:
<form action="/weblog/submit" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <label> Attach your audio-blog sound file: <input type="file" name="blog" accept="audio/*"/> </label> <input type="submit" value="Blog!"/> </form>
A compliant UA could, upon encountering this form, provide a "Record" button instead of, or in addition to, the more usual "Browse" button. Selecting this button could then bring up a sound recording application.
This is expected to be most useful on small devices that do not have file systems and for which the only way of handling file upload is to generate the content on the fly.
ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH
code is used to indicate that at least one of the selected files does not
have a MIME type conforming to one of the MIME types listed as
acceptable. UAs may allow the user to override the MIME type to be one of
the allowable types if the file is originally incorrectly
labeled.
accept attribute is set on a
form element, it sets the default for any file upload
controls in that form. If a file upload control has a valid accept attribute, its value is used and the
relevant form element's accept
attribute is ignored for that control. If a file upload control has an
accept attribute but it is invalid,
then the value */* is assumed instead, and the form's
accept attribute is ignored.
If the file upload process fails, UAs should report this failure to the user in a useful and accessible manner, as with any failed submission.
If a file selected for upload does not have an explicit file name (for example because the user agent allowed the user to create the submitted file on the fly) then the file name shall be the empty string for the purposes of submission.
form elementThe form element's action
attribute is no longer a required attribute. Authors may omit it. When the
attribute is absent, UAs must act as if the action attribute
was the empty string, which is a relative URI pointing at the current
document (or the specified base URI, if any).
To support incremental updates of forms, a new attribute is introduced
on the form element: replace. This attribute takes two values:
target attribute when the document uses frames or windows)
is replaced by the return value.
These names, and their exact semantics, differ from those
of the equivalent attribute in XForms 1.0 (the replace attribute on the
submission element). The equivalent of document
in this specification is all in XForms, and the equivalent of
values is instance. The equivalent of the XForms
none value is document with the server returning
an HTTP 204 No Content return code.
The exact semantics are described in detail in the section on submission, under step eight.
Normally, activating a submit button (an input or
button element with the type attribute set to
submit, or an input
element with the type attribute set to image) submits the form, using the form's
submission details (action, method,
enctype, and replace
attributes).
In some cases, authors would like to be able to submit a form to
different processors, using different submission methods, or not replacing
the form but just updating the details with new data. For this reason, the
following attributes are allowed on submit buttons: action,
method, enctype, replace, and target.
If a submit button is activated, then the submission uses the values as
given by the button that caused the activation. For missing attributes,
the values of the equivalent attributes on the relevant form
element, if any, are used instead.
There are several elements that are defined as expecting particular elements as children. Using the DOM, or in XML, it is possible for authors to violate these expectations and place elements in unexpected places.
Similarly, attributes are defined to accept values that conform to certain syntaxes, but it is possible for authors to violate these constrains.
Authors must not do this. User agent implementors may curse authors who violate these rules, and may persecute them to the full extent allowed by applicable international law.
Upon encountering incorrect constructs, UAs must proceed as follows:
form elements in head elements
in XHTML
head elements. No other special behaviour is required to
cope with this case; if the author overrides this hiding (e.g. through
CSS) then the form must behave like any other form. (This does not apply
to HTML, where a form in a head would, per SGML
parsing rules, imply a body start tag.)
input elements
output elements containing
elements in the DOM
defaultValue DOM attribute is initialized from the DOM3 Core
textContent attribute ([DOM3CORE]). Setting the element's
value attribute is defined to be identical to setting the
DOM3 Core textContent attribute. While the element contains
elements, they are rendered according to the CSS rules.
textarea elements containing tags in HTML
textarea elements containing elements in the DOM
defaultValue DOM attribute is identical to the
textContent DOM attribute both for reading and writing, and
is used to set the initial value. The rendering is based on
the value DOM attribute, not the contents of the element,
unless CSS is used to override this somehow.
select and optgroup elements containing
nodes other than option and optgroup elements
option and optgroup elements take
part in the select semantics. Unless otherwise forced to
appear by a stylesheet, other child nodes are never visible.
option elements containing nodes other than text
nodes
textContent DOM attribute's value.
How such markup should be rendered is undefined. Two possibilities are
sensible: rendering the content normally, just as it would have been
outside the form control; and rendering the initial value (the value
stored in the DOM defaultValue attribute) only, with the
rest of the content not displayed (unless forced to appear through some
CSS).
option and optgroup elements that are
not inside select elements
span
elements.
accept attributes that are
invalid
*/* when doing comparisons with
actual MIME types, e.g. to filter a file list or when validating the
control prior to submission.
value attributes that are invalid according to the
type attribute
defaultValue attribute, but will not be used as the value of
the control. The control will therefore initially be empty.
value attributes that are invalid according to the
min, max,
step, maxlength, etc, attributes
for) to elements that
are not form controls
htmlFor) but the control DOM attribute must return null and
activating the label must not send focus to the associated element.
for attributes and containing
more than one form control
control DOM attribute must
return, and activating the label, if supported, must transfer focus to or
activate, the first control in a depth-first search of the label's
children.
min attribute on a datetime control is an integer instead of a
date and time string, then the range has no minimum. If the
type attribute is then changed to number, then the attribute would take effect.
Other invalid cases should be handled analogously.
Occasionally forms contain repeating sections. For example, an order form could have one row per item, with product, quantity, and subtotal fields. The repeating form controls model defines how such a form can be described without resorting to scripting.
The entire model can be emulated purely using JavaScript and the DOM. With such a library, this model could be used and down-level clients could be supported before user agents implemented it ubiquitously. Creating such a library is left as an exercise for the reader.
This subsection is not normative.
Occasionally, a form may need a section to be repeated an arbitrary number of times. For example, an order form could have one row per item. Traditionally, this has been implemented either by using complex client-side scripts or by sending a request to the server for every new row.
Using the mechanisms described in this section, the problem is reduced to describing a template in the markup, and then specifying where and when that template should be repeated.
To explain this, we will step through an example. Here is a sample form with three rows:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Order Form</title>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Product</th>
<th>Quantity</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type="text" name="row0.product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row0.quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type="text" name="row1.product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row1.quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type="text" name="row2.product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row2.quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><button type="submit">Submit</button></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
The template for those rows could look something like:
<tr>
<td><input type="text" name="row0.product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row0.quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
...except that then the names would all be the same — all rows would be "row0", so there would be no clear way of distinguishing which "quantity" went with which "product" except by the order in which they were submitted.
To get around this, the template is modified slightly:
<tr id="order">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
The template now has a unique identifier ("order"), and that identifier
is used to indicate where the row index should be substituted in. When a
template is replicated, all the attributes containing the template's id
between square bracket characters ([id]) have that
ID (and the brackets) replaced by a unique index.
To prevent an attribute from being processed in this way,
put a non-breaking zero-width space character ()
at the start of the attribute value. When the template is cloned, that
character will be removed, but any other text in the attribute will be
left alone. This could be useful if you have no control over the rest of
the contents in the attribute, e.g. if it is user configurable text.
In order to distinguish this row from a normal row, something needs to
be added to the template to mark it as being a template. This is done
using a repeat attribute:
<tr id="order" repeat="template">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
If we replace the table with that markup:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Order Form</title>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Product</th>
<th>Quantity</th>
</tr>
<tr id="order" repeat="template">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><button type="submit">Submit</button></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
...then nothing but the header will appear! This is because templates
are not rendered. Templates have to be repeated. This is done
with the repeat-start
attribute:
...
<tr id="order" repeat="template" repeat-start="3">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
</table>
This is now identical to the original example (three rows with empty fields will appear). It still isn't dynamic — there is no way for the user to add more rows.
This can be solved by adding an add
button. The add button type adds a copy of
a template when the user presses the button.
There are two ways to use add buttons.
The first is by explicitly specifying which template should be replicated:
<p><button type="add" template="order">Add Row</button></p>
The template is specified using a template attribute on the button
type="add" or input type="add" elements. In the
template attribute, you put the ID of
the template you want the button to affect.
When such a button is pressed, the template is replicated, and the resulting block is inserted just after the last block that is associated with the template. For example, there are three rows in the example above, so if the user pressed that button, the new block would be inserted just after the third one.
The second way is by including an add
button inside the template, so that when the template is replicated, the
button is replicated into the resulting block. When such a button is
pressed, the template is replicated, and inserted immediately after the
block in which the button is found. For example, if there were add buttons in the rows of the example above, and
someone pressed the button in the first row, a row would be inserted
between the first row and the second row.
For this example we will only do it the first way:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Order Form</title>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Product</th>
<th>Quantity</th>
</tr>
<tr id="order" repeat="template" repeat-start="3">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><button type="add" template="order">Add Row</button></p>
<p><button type="submit">Submit</button></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Now the user can add more rows, but he cannot remove them. Removing rows
is done via the remove button type.
When a user presses such a button, the row in which the button is kept is
removed from the document.
<button type="remove">Remove This Row</button>
This is added to the template so that it appears on every row:
<tr id="order" repeat="template" repeat-start="3">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Remove This Row</button></td>
</tr>
The final result looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Order Form</title>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Product</th>
<th>Quantity</th>
</tr>
<tr id="order" repeat="template" repeat-start="3">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Remove This Row</button></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><button type="add" template="order">Add Row</button></p>
<p><button type="submit">Submit</button></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
If the user pressed "Add" once, removed the middle two rows, typed in some garbage in the two "product" text fields, and pressed "Submit", the user agent would submit the following name-value pairs:
row0.product=some row0.quantity=1 row3.product=garbage row3.quantity=1
Further examples are given in the examples section below.
The repetition model supports more than just the cases given above; for
instance, there are move-up and
move-down buttons that can be
inserted inside templates much like the remove button but for moving rows up and down.
Repetition templates can also be nested. The concept of hierarchy is expected to be represented in the names, as it is in manually-created repeating forms; for example:
order0.name order0.quantity order0.comment0.text order0.comment1.text order1.name order1.quantity order1.comment0.text
That way the submission can remain compatible with the long-established
multipart/form-data, yet not lose the structure of the data.
The naming schemes used above are arbitrary. Any naming scheme could be used, at the convenience of the author.
To include prefilled rows in the document, include copies of the row
with repeat attributes having the value
of the repetition index you want to use for that block.
For example, here is a prefilled version of the earlier table, with one row having index "1" with the text "Tom figurine" in the first field and "12" in the second, and with a second row having index "2" and values "Jerry figurine" and "5".
...
<table>
<tr>
<th>Product</th>
<th>Quantity</th>
</tr>
<tr repeat="1">
<td><input type="text" name="row1.product" value="Tom figurine"></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row1.quantity" value="12"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Remove This Row</button></td>
</tr>
<tr repeat="2">
<td><input type="text" name="row2.product" value="Jerry figurine"></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row2.quantity" value="5"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Remove This Row</button></td>
</tr>
<tr id="order" repeat="template" repeat-start="1">
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].product" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="row[order].quantity" value="1"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Remove This Row</button></td>
</tr>
</table>
...
Prefilled rows must go before the template.
Prefilled rows can contain any content; it need not match the template.
In order to be considered a part of the repetition model, however, the row
must have a repeat attribute with a
numeric value. That value can be any integer. (For example, you could use
"-1" as the value of all prefilled rows.)
In HTML4-compliant UAs that do not implement this specification, the template acts as an initial blank row, and the "add" and "remove", buttons cause the form to be submitted, allowing the server to simulate the insertion and removal of rows.
The add and remove buttons act as submit buttons in
compliant HTML4 UAs only if button elements are used. If
input buttons are used, then legacy UAs will instead render
the controls as text fields. It is thus recommended that authors use
button elements.
This specification does not address the ability to select a repetition block to move it up or down without using buttons directly associated with the current block.
This section makes a number of references to namespaces. For authors who are only using HTML or XHTML, the definitions below ensure that no namespaces need appear in the document (except the namespace on the root element). Thus, such a reader can simply gloss over the parts that mention namespaces.
Several new global attributes are introduced as part of the repetition
model: repeat, repeat-start, repeat-min, repeat-max, and repeat-template. When placed on
elements in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, they
must be namespace-free attributes, and when placed on other elements, they
must be attributes in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
namespace.
The most important one is the repeat
attribute. The effect of this attribute depends on its value, which can be
either the literal string "template",
or an integer.
An element in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace
with the repeat attribute
in no namespace, or an element in any other namespace with the repeat attribute in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, with the attribute's
value equal to template, is a repetition template.
Repetition templates may occur anywhere. They are not specifically associated with any form.
Every template has an index associated with it. The initial value of a
template's index is always 0. The index is used to ensure that when
cloning templates, the new block has a unique ID. The template's index
does not appear in the markup. (It does, however, appear in the DOM, as
the repetitionIndex
attribute.)
Unrecognized values must be ignored.
<div repeat="template"/> <!-- A template. --> <div repeat="template +1 3"/> <!-- Not a template. --> <div repeat=" template"/> <!-- Not a template (leading whitespace). -->
Authors may use "title" attributes on templates (if they are in the HTML namespace) to describe their purpose. Assistive technologies may then use these descriptions to help users. (Note, though, that such titles would get propagated to the repetition blocks too.)
An element in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace
with the repeat attribute
in no namespace, or an element in any other namespace with the repeat
attribute in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, with
the attribute's value equal to an integer (an optional leading '-'
character followed by one or more decimal digits), is a repetition block.
Repetition blocks may have a repeat-template attribute to
specify a template that the block is to be associated with. If the
document contains an element with an ID equal to the value of the repeat-template attribute, and that
element is a repetition template,
then that is the template that the repetition block is associated with.
(In the case of duplicate IDs, the behaviour should be the same as with
getElementById().) Otherwise, if the repeat-template attribute does not
point to a repetition template, then the element is not associated with a
template.
Repetition blocks without a repeat-template attribute are
associated with their first following sibling that is a repetition
template, if there is one.
Repetition blocks that don't have an associated template are called orphan repetition blocks. They can take part in the deletion and movement aspects of the repetition model, but not addition.
Every repetition block has an index associated with it. The index's
initial value is the value of the repeat attribute.
<div> <div repeat="0"/> <!-- A simple repetition block, index 0. --> <div repeat="-5"/> <!-- Another, index -5 --> <div repeat="2"/> <!-- A simple repetition block, index 2. --> <div repeat="nothing"/> <!-- Just a normal element. --> <div repeat=" 3"/> <!-- Another normal element (leading whitespace). --> <div repeat="template"/> <!-- The template for the last few elements. --> <div repeat="1"/> <!-- Orphan repetition block, index 1. --> </div> <div repeat="0"/> <!-- Orphan repetition block, index 0. -->
Several new button types are introduced to support the repetition model.
These values are valid types for both the button element and
the input element.
add
remove
move-up
move-down
These control types can never be successful.
When these new types are used with input buttons, the
value attribute shall, if present, provide the button caption
(although this may be further overridden by the stylesheet). When the
value attribute is absent, the buttons should be given
locale-dependent default labels, in the same way as submit and reset buttons.
However, user agents may instead render buttons consistent with those performing equivalent functions in the user's operating environment. For this reason, authors who are nesting repetition blocks should position such buttons carefully to make clear which block a button applies to.
Invoking these buttons generates events (such as click), as
specified by the DOM specifications. The default action for these events
is to act as described below. However, if the event is canceled, then the
default action will not occur.
In addition, to support the add type, a
new attribute is introduced to the button and
input elements: template.
template
These new types and attributes are described in more detail in the next few sections.
repeat-min and repeat-max attributesThe repeat-min attribute
specifies the number of repetition blocks that the remove button type will ensure are present each
time a block is removed. Its value must be a positive integer (one or more
digits 0-9 interpreted as a base ten number). If the attribute is omitted
or if it has an invalid value then it is treated as if its value was zero.
The repeat-max attribute
specifies the maximum number of repetition blocks that the add button type can cause to be present. Its value
must be a positive integer (one or more digits 0-9 interpreted as a base
ten number). If the attribute is omitted or if it has an invalid value
then there is no limit.
These two attributes have no effect on the repetition model when present
on elements that do not have a repeat
attribute with the value set to template.
The repetition model includes several events. These use the following interface to store their context information.
/* Similar to the UIEvent interface */
interface RepetitionEvent : Event {
readonly attribute RepetitionElement element;
void initRepetitionEvent(in DOMString typeArg,
in boolean canBubbleArg,
in boolean cancelableArg,
in RepetitionElement elementArg);
void initRepetitionEventNS(in DOMString namespaceURIArg,
in DOMString typeArg,
in boolean canBubbleArg,
in boolean cancelableArg,
in RepetitionElement elementArg);
};
The initRepetitionEvent() and
initRepetitionEventNS() methods have the same behaviours as
the initEvent() and initEventNS() events from [DOM3EVENTS].
A repetition template should not be displayed. In CSS-aware user agents, this should be achieved by including the following rules, or their equivalent, in the UA's user agent stylesheet:
@namespace xh url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
:not(xh|*)[xh|repeat="template"],
xh|*[|repeat="template"] { display: none; }
Any form controls inside a repetition
template are associated with their forms'
templateElements DOM attributes, and are not present
in the forms' elements DOM attributes. Since controls in the
templateElements attribute cannot be successful, controls inside repetition templates
can never be submitted. They also cannot be prefilled directly when the
form is preseeded. However, see the section on seeding a form with initial values for details on
how repetition blocks can be prefilled.
If an add button with a template attribute is activated, and its
template attribute gives the ID of an
element in the document that is a repetition
template as defined above, then that template's replication
behaviour is invoked. (Specifically, in scripting-aware environments, the
template's addRepetitionBlock() method is
called with a null argument.) In the case of duplicate IDs, the behaviour
should be the same as with getElementById().
If an add button without a
template attribute is activated, and
it has an ancestor that is a repetition
block that is not an orphan repetition block, then
the repetition template associated
with that repetition block has its template replication behaviour invoked
with the respective repetition block as its argument. (Specifically, in
scripting-aware environments, the template's addRepetitionBlock() method is
called with a reference to the DOM Element node that represents the
repetition block.)
When a template's replication behaviour is invoked (specifically, when
either its addRepetitionBlock() method is
called or its addRepetitionBlockByIndex()
method is called) the following is performed:
repeat-max attribute and that attribute's
value is less than or equal to the number of repetition blocks associated
with this template that were found in the previous step, the UA must stop
at this step, returning a null value.
addRepetitionBlockByIndex()
method, and the value of the method's index argument is greater than the
template's index, then the template's index is set to the value of the
method's index argument.
addRepetitionBlockByIndex()
method, the new repetition block element's index is set to the method's
index argument. Otherwise, the new repetition block element's index is
set to the template's index.
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, then the repeat attribute in no namespace on the cloned
element has its value changed to the new block's index. Otherwise, the
repeat attribute in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace has its value changed
to the new block's index.
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, then any repeat-min, repeat-max, or repeat-start attributes in no namespace
are removed from the element. Otherwise, any repeat-min, repeat-max, or repeat-start attributes in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace are removed instead.
For example, if the template is called order, and the new
repetition block's index has the value 2, and one of the attributes of
one of the descendants of the new repetition block is marked up as
name="order.[order].comment.[comment[order]]", then the
attribute's value is changed to order.2.comment.[comment2].
However, if the attribute was written as
name="order.[order]", then its value would have
only been changed to order[order], only removing the
leading character.
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, then the repeat-template attribute in no
namespace on the cloned element has its value set to the template's name.
Otherwise, the repeat-template attribute in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace has its value set to
the template's name.
added event in the repetition model's events
namespace, which bubbles but is not cancelable and has no default action,
is fired on the repetition template with the repetition block's DOM node
as the context information.
In addition, user agents must automatically disable add buttons (irrespective of the value of the
disabled DOM attribute) when the
buttons are not in a repetition block that has an associated template and
their template attribute is either
not specified or does not have an ID that points to a repetition template,
and, when the repetition template's repeat-max attribute is less than or equal
to the number of repetition blocks that are associated with that template
and that have the same parent. This automatic disabling does not affect
the DOM disabled attribute. It is an
intrinsic property of these buttons.
For an example, see the example section below.
If a remove button is activated, and
the element has an ancestor that is a repetition block as defined above, then the
nearest such ancestor's template deletion behaviour is invoked.
(Specifically, in scripting-aware environments, the element's removeRepetitionBlock() method is
invoked.)
When a repetition block's deletion behaviour is invoked (specifically,
when its removeRepetitionBlock()
method is called) the following is performed:
removed event
in the repetition model's events namespace, which bubbles but is not
cancelable and has no default action, is fired on the element's
repetition template, with the repetition block's DOM node as the context
information.
repeat-min
attribute, the template's replication behaviour is invoked (specifically,
its addRepetitionBlock()
method is called).
In addition, user agents must automatically disable remove buttons (irrespective of the value of the
disabled DOM attribute) when the
buttons are not in a repetition block. This automatic disabling does not
affect the DOM disabled attribute. It
is an intrinsic property of these buttons.
For an example, see the example section below.
The two remaining button types, move-up and move-down, are used to move repetition blocks
up or down past its sibling repetition blocks.
If a move-up or move-down button is activated, and the
element has an ancestor that is a repetition
block as defined above, then the nearest such ancestor's
template movement behaviour is invoked in the relevant direction.
(Specifically, in scripting-aware environments, the element's moveRepetitionBlock() method is
called; for move-up buttons the
argument is -1 and for move-down
buttons the argument is 1).
When a repetition block's movement behaviour is invoked (specifically,
when its moveRepetitionBlock() method
is called) the following is performed, where distance is an
integer representing how far and in what direction to move the block (the
argument to the method):
previousSibling is defined and
is not a repetition template, set
target to this previousSibling and, if it is a
repetition block, increase
distance by one (make it less negative by one).
nextSibling is defined
and is not a repetition template,
set target to this nextSibling and, if it is a
repetition block, decrease
distance by one. After the loop, set target to
target's nextSibling (which may be null).
insertBefore()
method with the newChild argument being the repetition block
and the refChild argument being target (which may
be null by this point). Mutation events are fired if appropriate.
moved event in the repetition model's events namespace,
which bubbles but is not cancelable and has no default action, is fired
on the element's repetition template (if it has one) with the repetition
block's DOM node as the context information.
This occurs even if the repetition block is an orphan repetition block (although if it is, the event is not fired).
Moving repetition blocks does not change the index of the repetition blocks.
In addition, user agents must automatically disable move-up buttons (irrespective of the value of
the disabled DOM attribute) when
their repetition block could not be moved any higher according to the
algorithm above, and when the buttons are not in a repetition block.
Similarly, user agents must automatically disable move-down buttons when their repetition block
could not be moved any lower according to the algorithm above, and when
the buttons are not in a repetition block. This automatic disabling does
not affect the DOM disabled
attribute. It is an intrinsic property of these buttons.
The repeat-start attribute on
repetition templates is used to insert repetition blocks at load time
without having to explicitly copy the repetition template markup in the
source document or use scripting.
When present, the attribute must contain one or more digits 0-9 interpreted as a base ten integer. If the value is not in this format, or if the attribute is omitted, the value "1" is used instead.
Before load events are fired, but after the entire document
has been parsed and after forms with data attributes are
prefilled (if necessary), UAs must iterate through every node in the
document, depth first, looking for templates so that their initial
repetition blocks can be created. For each element that has a repeat attribute with the literal value template, the UA must invoke the template's
replication behaviour as many times as the repeat-start attribute on the same element
specifies (just once, if the attribute is missing or has an invalid
value). Then, while the number of repetition blocks associated with the
repetition template is less than the template's repeat-min attribute, the template's
replication behaviour must be invoked (specifically, its addRepetitionBlock() method is
called).
UAs should not specifically wait for images and stylesheets to be loaded before creating initial repetition blocks as described above.
The repetition templates and blocks are present in the DOM, and all modifications to these blocks (whether via the DOM or via the buttons described above) result in mutation events being fired on the document. Assistive technologies can therefore use normal DOM navigation and mutation event listeners to help present repetition sections to the user.
This section gives some more practical examples of repetition.
The following example shows how to use repetition templates to dynamically add rows to a form in a table.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Form Repeat Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action="http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/test-tools/echo" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Number of Cats</th>
<th></th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr repeat="0">
<td><input type="text" name="name_0" value="John Smith"></td>
<td><input type="text" name="count_0" value="2"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Delete Row</button></td>
</tr>
<tr repeat="template" id="row">
<td><input type="text" name="name_[row]" value=""></td>
<td><input type="text" name="count_[row]" value="1"></td>
<td><button type="remove">Delete Row</button></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
<button type="add" template="row">Add Row</button>
<button type="submit">Submit</button>
</p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Initially, two rows would be visible, each with two text input fields,
the first row having the values "John Smith" and "2", the second row
having the values "" (a blank text field) and "1". The second row is the
result of the (implied) repeat-start attribute adding a
repetition block when the document was loaded.
If the "Add Row" button is pressed, a new row is added. The first such row would have the index 2 (since there are already two repetition blocks numbered 0 and 1) and so the controls would be named "name_2" and "count_2" respectively.
If the "Delete Row" button above is pressed, the row is removed.
The previous example does not demonstrate nested repeat blocks, reordering repetition blocks, and inserting new repetition blocks in the middle of the existing sequence, all of which are possible using the facilities described above.
This example shows nested repeats.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Solar System</title>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<h1> Solar system </h1>
<p> <label> System Name: <input name="name"/> </label> </p>
<h2> Planets </h2>
<ol>
<li repeat="template" repeat-start="0" id="planets">
<label> Name: <input name="planet[planets].name" required="required"/> </label>
<h3> Moons </h3>
<ul>
<li repeat="template" repeat-start="0" id="planet[planets].moons">
<input name="planet[planets].moon[planet[planets].moons]"/>
<button type="remove">Delete Moon</button/>
</li>
</ul>
<p><button type="add" template="planet[planets].moons">Add Moon</button></p>
<p><button type="remove">Delete Planet</button></p>
</li>
</ol>
<p><button type="add" template="planets">Add Planet</button></p>
<p><button type="submit">Submit</button></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Note that to uniquely identify each nested repeat (which is required
since the add buttons are dependent on IDs
to specify which template should have a block added), the IDs of the
nested templates are specified in terms of the ancestor template's ID,
using the index substitution feature.
Since square brackets are not allowed in ID attributes in XML, the above example cannot validate to an XML DTD. It is still well-formed, however, and conformant to this specification.
The following events are considered form events:
Some of these events are described in [DOM3EVENTS] and [HTML4]. This section introduces the new events and new semantics for the existing events.
click
event and input controlsDuring the handling of a click event on an
input element with a type attribute that has the
value "radio" or "checkbox", user agents must change the value
of the checked property of the elements affected before the
event is dispatched in the document. The default action of the
click event in this case is to fire a
DOMActivate event,
and the default action of the DOMActivate event is to fire
the change event (assuming the activation did change the
value). If the default action of any of these events is canceled, the
value of the properties changed must be changed back to their original
value.
This is a change from DOM2 HTML where this behaviour was optional. [DOM2HTML]
change
and input eventsIn [DOM3EVENTS] and [HTML4], the change event is fired on a
form control element when the control loses the input focus and its value
has been modified since gaining focus.
This specification changes these semantics to more accurately reflect
the behaviour expected by Web authors. Specifically, for controls
implemented with a non-editable stateful UI (e.g. select
elements, checkboxes, or radio buttons as deployed in typical desktop Web
browsers), the change event shall be fired when the selection
is completed, even if the control does not lose focus. (For example, if a
date control has a button which shows a
calendar, then the change event would fire when the calendar
is closed after the user selected a date.)
In addition, to address the need for even more immediate feedback
mechanisms, this specification introduces the input event. This event is fired on a
control whenever the value of the control changes due to input from the
user, and is otherwise identical to the change event. (For
example, it bubbles, is not cancelable, and has no context information.)
UAs may delay firing the input event if the data entry is
rapid. Authors must not rely on this event firing once for each key press,
mouse input, or similar.
When the change event is fired at the same time as the
input event, the input event must be fired
first.
Change and input events must never be triggered by scripted changes to the control value. Thus, loops caused by change event handlers triggering changes are not usually possible.
Any element that accepts an onchange attribute to handle
change events shall also accept an oninput
attribute to handle input events, except the output element (for which it would make no
sense).
Sometimes form controls are inter-dependent. In these cases, it is more
intuitive to specify the dependencies on the control whose value or
attributes depend on another's, rather than specify which controls should
be affected by a change on the element that changes. For this reason, two
new events are introduced, formchange and forminput.
These events are in the same namespace as the other form events, do not bubble, cannot be canceled, have no context information, and have no default action.
The default action of a change event on most elements is to
fire a formchange event at each
element in the form's elements, in document order, and
finally at the form itself. Note that template controls are not affected.
If authors need this event to affect template controls, they should hook
into the form's onformchange event handler.
The exception is the output control.
Since changing an output control is
often the result of a formchange
event, change events whose target is an output control do not cause formchange events to be dispatched.
The input event analogously invokes the forminput event as its default action (again,
except if the target is an output
control).
When a form is reset, a formchange event is fired on all the form
controls of the form in the same way.
If authors wish to use formchange events to set up the initial
state of the form (for forms with complex dependencies), they can either
write a script to call dispatchFormChange() on the form, or
set the data attribute of the form to
data:application/xml,<formdata%20xmlns ...
%20type=%22incremental%22/>, which is
equivalent to seeding a form with no new values.
With the introduction of the various type-checking mechanisms, some way
for scripting authors to hook into the type-checking process is required.
This is provided by the change event and the new invalid event (in the
http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events namespace).
Authors should use the change and input events
to specify custom validation code. Authors who
use custom validation code should keep the validity flags up to date at
all times, so that the :invalid
pseudo class correctly matches elements as they go in and out of valid
states, and so that UAs can provide up to date hints to the user to help
him fill in the form.
When a form is submitted, user agents
must act as if they used the following algorithm: First, each control in
that form's elements list is added to a temporary list (note
that the elements list is defined to be in document order).
Then, each control in this list whose willValidate DOM attribute is true is
checked for validity, and an invalid
event is fired on each control that, when checked, is found to fail to
comply with its constraints (i.e. each control whose validity DOM attribute is non-zero) and is
still a member of the form.
This definition implies a defined behaviour in the face of
event handlers that mutate the document. For example, if one control's
oninvalid attribute changes a later control's value from
invalid to valid, the event is not fired on that later control, yet in the
reverse case, if a later form control's oninvalid attribute
changes an earlier control, then the earlier control is not checked again.
Controls added to the form during the process will not have any events
fired, even if their value is invalid. Controls invalid at the start of
the process that are removed from the form before receiving their events
simply don't receive the event. Controls that change from one invalid
state to another invalid state before receiving their event receive an
event that describes their state at the point in the process at which they
were checked and had the event fired on them.
The event can also be fired if the validate()
method of a
form or form
control is invoked via script.
The oninvalid attribute (on input,
textarea and select elements) can be used to
write handlers for this event.
This event bubbles and is cancelable.
The default action is UA-specific, but is expected to consist of focusing the element (possibly firing focus events if appropriate), and alerting the user (ideally using a non-modal mechanism such as a help balloon) that the entered value is unacceptable in the user's native language along with explanatory text saying why the value is currently invalid.
If the reason the control is invalid is an author defined custom error then
the message that the author provided using the setCustomValidity() method should be
used.
If the event was fired during form submission or as a result of the
form's form.validate() method
being called, UAs would typically only focus the first form control found
to be invalid, although UAs are encouraged to give the user an idea of
what other fields are invalid. The event shall, however, still be
dispatched to all invalid controls whose willValidate DOM attribute is true. If the
event was fired as a result of a control's validate() method, then the default action is
performed regardless of whether the script has checked other controls as
well.
If the element causing trouble is not visible (for example, a field made
invisible using CSS or a field of type hidden) then the UA may wish to indicate to the
user that there may be an error with the page's script.
When a radio group has no checked radio button and more than one of the
radio buttons is marked as required,
the UA should only tell the user that the radio group as a whole is
missing a value, not complain about each radio button in turn, even though
all of the radio buttons marked with the required attribute would have the ERROR_REQUIRED code set.
Authors are encouraged to either cancel all invalid events (if they wish to handle the
error UI themselves) or to not cancel any (if they wish to leave the error
UI to the UA). Canceling one invalid
event and reporting the error via script does not prevent the UA from
handling another invalid event,
possibly confusing the user by having two separate errors reported
simultaneously in different ways. To cancel all events, a single capturing
listener could be placed on the root element node canceling the default
action of all invalid events.
The following example shows one way to use this event.
<form action="..." method="post">
<p>
<label>
Byte 1:
<input name="byte" type="number" min="0" max="255" required="required"
oninvalid="failed(event)" />
</label>
<output name="error"/>
</p>
<script type="text/javascript"> <![CDATA[
function failed(event) {
// a control can fail for more than one reason; only report one of them.
form.error.value = 'The value is wrong for a reason I did not expect.';
if (event.target.validity & event.target.form.ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH)
form.error.value = 'You must enter a number.';
else if (event.target.validity & event.target.form.ERROR_STEP_MISMATCH)
form.error.value = 'Fractional numbers are not allowed.';
else if (event.target.validity & event.target.form.ERROR_RANGE_UNDERFLOW)
form.error.value = 'The number must be zero or greater.';
else if (event.target.validity & event.target.form.ERROR_RANGE_OVERFLOW)
form.error.value = 'The number must be 255 or less.';
else if (event.target.validity & event.target.form.ERROR_REQUIRED)
form.error.value = 'You must enter a number.';
event.preventDefault(); /* don't want the UA to do its own reporting */
}
]]> </script>
</form>
The ReceivedEvent interface
is used in the form submission process to handle the results of form
submission.
interface ReceivedEvent : Event {
readonly attribute Document receivedDocument;
void initReceivedEvent(in DOMString typeArg,
in boolean canBubbleArg,
in boolean cancelableArg,
in Document documentArg);
void initReceivedEventNS(in DOMString namespaceURIArg,
in DOMString typeArg,
in boolean canBubbleArg,
in boolean cancelableArg,
in Document documentArg);
};
The initReceivedEvent() and
initReceivedEventNS() methods have the same behaviours as the
initEvent() and initEventNS() events from [DOM3EVENTS].
The receivedDocument attribute (set from the
documentArg argument) contains a reference to the document that
was the result of the form submission. If the result cannot be represented
as a DOM document, then the attribute is null. The document is mutable.
DOMControlValueChanged eventA DOMControlValueChanged event, which bubbles, has no
default action, and uses the basic Event interface, is fired
an a control whenever its value changes, for whatever reason (including a
scripted change).
This event has no corresponding event handler attribute and is primarily intended for use by assistive technologies.
Processors conforming to this specification must use a slightly different algorithm than the [HTML4] form submission algorithm (HTML4 section 17.13.3), as described in this section.
When the user agent submits a form, it must perform the following steps.
submit event
If the submission was not initiated using the submit() method then the submit event is submitted as described in [HTML4]. If it is canceled, then the submission
processing stops at this point. If it is not canceled, then its default
action is to perform the rest of the submission procedure.
If the form submission was initiated as a result of a submit event's default action, then the form
is checked for validity. If, after the
form has had any relevant invalid
events fired, any controls remain invalid, then the submission shall be
aborted.
Otherwise, if the form submission was initiated via the submit() method, then instead of firing
invalid events, a
SYNTAX_ERR exception shall be raised (and submission is
aborted) if any of the controls are invalid. [DOM3CORE]
Script authors who wish to validate the form before performing submission can use script such as:
if (form.validate())
form.submit();
...which will cause the UA to report the errors to the user, exactly as if the user had clicked a submit button.
All the controls that apply to the form should be identified, in
document order. These controls are all those whose forms DOM attribute have an entry that points
at the form and that are not in the form's templateElements
DOM attribute (this excludes certain controls as specified in the
section describing the repetition model, but does include
the image controls that are excluded in the definition of the
elements DOM attribute).
A form data set consists of a form control list and a repetition block list.
The form control list is a sequence of control-name, control-index, current-value triplets constructed from the controls identified in the previous step.
The control index here is unrelated to the repetition index mentioned earlier.
It is constructed by iterating over the form controls listed in step
three, taking note of the form control names as they are seen. With each
control, if it is the first time that control's name has been seen, then
the control is assigned a control index of 0. Otherwise, if the control
name was associated with an earlier control, then the index assigned is
exactly one more than the last control with that name. Even unsuccessful
controls and controls with no value are so numbered (including output elements). However, only successful controls are added to the form data
set.
Successful controls have exactly one value, except for
select controls and file upload controls, which have zero
or more values depending on how many items or files they have selected.
A successful control with more than one value is added multiple times,
one for each value (each time with the same form control name and form
control index). A successful control with zero values is omitted from
the form data set.
Image buttons, during this step, are handled as if they were two
controls, one with the control's name with .x appended,
whose value is the x coordinate selected by the user, and the other with
the control's name with .y appended, whose value is the y
coordinate selected by the user. The indices of these two virtual
controls are handled separately and could, depending on the values of
other controls, end up with different values.
For example, the following form:
<form>
<p> <label> Name: <input type="text" name="username"/> </label> </p>
<p> Lottery numbers:
<input name="number" type="number" min="1" max="49"/>
<input name="number" type="number" min="1" max="49"/>
<input name="number" type="number" min="1" max="49"/>
<input name="number" type="number" min="1" max="49"/>
<input name="number" type="number" min="1" max="49"/>
</p>
<p>
<label>
Games:
<select name="type" multiple="multiple">
<option value="Thunderbolt"> Thunderbolt </option>
<option value="Lightning"> Lightning </option>
</select>
</label>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Send">
</p>
</form>
...if filled in with the name "Erwin" and the numbers 20, 30 and 40 with the first and last number fields left blank, and all the values in the select list selected, would generate the following form data set:
The form data set also includes a list of which repetition blocks are involved in the submission.
For each control in the form data set, the control and the control's ancestors are examined, up to but not including the first node that is a common ancestor of the control and the form, or is the form itself. For each element so examined, if it is a repetition block that is not an orphan repetition block and whose template does have an ID, and that repetition block has not yet been added to the list of repetition blocks, it is added.
The form data set is then encoded according to the content type
specified by the method and enctype attributes
of the element that caused the form to be submitted. See the submitting
the encoded form data set section for details on how the
action and enctype attributes are to be
treated. The possible values of enctype defined by this
specification are:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
multipart/form-data
application/x-www-form+xml
text/plain
Other values may be defined by other specifications.
During this step, the form data set is examined to ensure all the characters are representable in the submission character encoding.
When Unicode encodings are used, text in the submission should be converted to normalisation form C (NFC) before encoding the data set. [UNICODE]
The encoded data is sent to the processing agent designated by the
action attribute of the element that initiated the
submission, using the protocol method specified by the
method attribute of that same element. If either of the
attributes is missing from that element, and that element is not a
form, then the relevant attribute on the element's
associated form element is used instead. (If it is
associated with multiple forms, the first one in the order given in the
form attribute
is used.) The submitting
the encoded form data set section describes this in more detail.
received event.
This step must be skipped if the form has no onreceived attribute. If this step is not
skipped, then it defeats any attempt at incremental rendering, as the
entire return value from the server must be downloaded and parsed before
the event is fired (unless the user agent instantiates the document
lazily).
The received event is fired on
the form element. This event does not bubble. The onreceived attribute can be used to
handle this event.
The event uses the ReceivedEvent interface.
If it is canceled, then the submission processing stops at this point.
If it is not canceled, then its default action is to perform the rest of
the submission procedure (step eight). If the document
attribute of the event was mutated, the mutated version is what is used
in the next step.
If the response is an HTTP 204 No Content response (or equivalent for other protocols), then the document is left in place, and new metadata (if any) is applied, as per the HTTP specification [RFC2616].
If the response is an HTTP 205 Reset Content response (or equivalent for other protocols), then the document is left in place, and all forms in the document are reset to their initial values, as per the HTTP specification [RFC2616].
Otherwise, how the UA responds to a response depends on the replace attribute of the element that
initiated the submission.
For replace="document" (the default), the response body
replaces the document from which the submission initiated (or, if there
is a target attribute, the document in the appropriate
frame or window).
For example, if the action attribute
denotes an HTTP resource, the method attribute is "POST",
the replace attribute is
document and the remote server replies with a 200
OK response, then the returned document should be displayed to
the user as if the user had navigated to that document by following a
link to it.
For replace="values", the algorithm described in the
section on seeding a form with initial values
must be run with the given response body used instead of the document
mentioned in the data attribute. (Any target attribute is
ignored.)
If the submission process fails, UAs should report this failure to the user in a useful and accessible manner.
The controls that are successful are those that are included in the submission (in the form data set) when their form is submitted.
All form controls are successful except:
templateElements list).
datalist
elements.
button, reset, add, remove,
move-up, or move-down.
Controls do not have to have a value to be successful.
The different form data set encoding types each define how to find the character encoding to use to submit the data.
Sometimes, the form submission character set used is not able to represent all the characters present in the form submission.
If the form data set contains characters that are outside the submission character set, the user agent should inform the user that his submission will be changed. For example, if the user entered "Dürst était très utile ici" in a text field but the author specified a character set where the "ü", "é", and "è" characters could not be represented, then the UA could use a dialog of the form:
____________________________________________________ || Warning ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| | | | This form cannot handle some of the characters you | | have entered (including "ü" and "é"). | | If you submit this form, the text will be changed | | before being sent (e.g. "D?rst"). | | | | (( Send anyway )) ( Cancel ) | `----------------------------------------------------'
When the value that is the cause of encoding problems is not accessible
to the user (e.g. a hidden form
control, one that is hidden by CSS, a read-only control, the value of an
option or radio element,
etc) the UA may wish to simply indicate to the user that there might be an
error with the page itself.
If the submission is not canceled, the user agent must replace each character that is not in the submission character set with one or more replacement characters.
For each such missing character, UAs must either transliterate the character to a UA-defined human-recognizable representation (for example, transliterating U+263A to the three-character string ":-)" in US-ASCII, or U+2126 to the byte 0xD9 in ISO-8859-7), or, for characters where a dedicated transliteration is not known to the UA, replace the character with either U+FFFD, "?", or some other single character representing the same semantic as U+FFFD.
Note that a string containing the codepoint's value itself (for example, the six-character string "U+263A" or the seven-character string "☺") is not considered to be human readable and must not be used as a transliteration. (This is to discourage servers from attempting to mechanically convert such codepoints back into Unicode characters, as there is no way to distinguish such characters from identical literal strings entered by the user.)
application/x-www-form-urlencodedThis section defines the expected behaviour for step 5, "Step five:
Encode the form data set", of the submission algorithm described above,
for the form content type application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
The rest of the form submission process progresses as described above.
This is the default content type. Forms submitted with this content type must be encoded as follows:
accept-charset attribute. UAs must use the encoding that
most completely covers the characters found in the form data set of the
encodings specified. If the attribute is not specified, then the client
should use either the page's character encoding, or, if that cannot
encode all the characters in the form data set, UTF-8. Character
encodings that are not mostly supersets of US-ASCII must not be used
(this includes UTF-16 and EBCDIC) even if specified in the
accept-charset attribute.
How a UA establishes the page's character encoding is determined by the markup language specification (for example, HTML4 section 5.2.2 [HTML4]). It could be explicitly specified by the page, overridden by the user, or auto-detected by the UA.
hidden with the name _charset_, it
is forced to appear in the form data set, with the value equal to the
name of the submission character encoding used.
Note that the control index and repetition block parts of the form data set are not used.
application/x-www-form+xml: XML submissionThis section defines the expected behaviour for step 5, "Step five:
Encode the form data set", of the submission algorithm described above,
for the form content type application/x-www-form+xml. The
rest of the form submission process progresses as described above.
The message entity is an XML 1.0 document, encoded as either UTF-8 or UTF-16 (at the choice of the UA), which has a root element named "submission", with no prefix, defining the default namespace to be the XML submission namespace. UAs may include an XML declaration (although doing so would be redundant). If using UTF-16, UAs must include a BOM. If using UTF-8, UAs may include a BOM, but it is not required.
Note that the form's accept-charset attribute is ignored
for this encoding type.
First, for each repetition block in the form data set, an element
repeat is inserted, with an attribute
template equal to the ID of the
template, and an attribute index equal to the index of the
repetition block. The element is empty.
Servers are generally expected to ignore repeat elements; they are primarily included so
that form data can be round-tripped using the data attribute
on the form element.
Then, for each successful control that is not
a file upload control, in the order that the controls are to be found in
the original document, an element field is inserted, with an
attribute name having the name of the
form control, an attribute index having the control index
described above in the definition of the form
data set, and with the element content being the current
value of the form control. Form controls with multiple values
result in multiple field elements being inserted into the
output, one for each value, all with the same index.
File controls are submitted using a file element instead of a field
element. The file element has four
attributes, name, index,
filename, and type. The name attribute contains the name of the file
control. The index attribute contains the control index in
the control's entry in the form data set. The filename
attribute is optional and may contain the name of the file, if it has one. The type attribute
is also optional and must either contain the MIME type of the file or be
omitted if the client is unaware of the correct type. The type may contain
MIME parameters if appropriate. [RFC2046] The
contents of the file are base64 encoded and then included literally as
content directly inside the file element.
As base64 data is whitespace-clean, UAs may introduce whitespace into the
file element to ensure the submitted data
has reasonable line lengths. This is, however, completely optional. (It is
primarily intended to make it possible to write readable examples of
submission output.)
UAs may use either CDATA blocks, entities, or both in escaping the contents of attributes and elements, as appropriate. The resulting XML must be a well-formed XML instance. The only mention of namespaces in the submission document must be the declaration of the default namespace on the root element.
Whitespace may be inserted around elements that are children of the
submission element in order to make the submitted data easier
to scan by eye. However, this is optional. Processors should not be
affected by such whitespace, or whitespace inside file elements, when reading the submitted data
back from the XML instance. (Whitespace inside field elements
is significant, however.)
While this section restricts the exact features of XML that a UA may use, these restrictions do not apply to the files used when seeding a form with initial values.
For forward compatibility, it is suggested that scripts skip past unexpected nodes and their descendents when processing XML files representing form submissions.
The following example illustrates
application/x-www-form+xml encoding. Suppose we have the
following form:
<form action="http://example.com/cgi/handle"
enctype="application/x-www-form+xml"
method="post">
<p>
<label> What is your name? <input type="text" name="submit-name"/> </label>
<label> What files are you sending? <input type="file" name="files"/> </label>
<label> When were they written? <input type="date" name="stamp"/> </label>
<input type="submit" value="Send">
</p>
</form>
If the user enters "Larry" in the text input, selects the text file "file1.txt", and picks an arbitrary date, the user agent might send back the following data:
Content-Type: application/x-www-form+xml <submission xmlns=...> <field name="submit-name" index="0">Larry</field> <file name="files" index="0" filename="file1.txt" type="text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1"> Y29udGVudHMgb2YgZmlsZTEudHh0 </file> <field name="stamp" index="0">1979-04-13</field> </submission>
If the user selects a second (image) file "file2.png", the user agent might construct the entity as follows:
Content-Type: application/x-www-form+xml <submission xmlns=...> <field name="submit-name" index="0">Larry</field> <file name="files" index="0" filename="file1.txt" type="text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1"> Y29udGVudHMgb2YgZmlsZTEudHh0 </file> <file name="files" index="0" filename="file2.png" type="image/png"> iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAMAAAAoyzS7AAAABGdBTUEAAK /INwWK6QAAABl0RVh0U29mdHdhcmUAQWRvYmUgSW1hZ2VSZWFkeXHJZTwA AAAGUExURQD/AAAAAG8DfkMAAAAMSURBVHjaYmAACDAAAAIAAU9tWeEAAA AASUVORK5CYII= </file> <field name="stamp" index="0">1979-12-27</field> </submission>
Note how the content of the plain text attached file is base64-encoded, despite being a plain text file. This preserves the integrity of the file in cases where the MIME type is incorrect. It also means that files with malformed content, for example, a file encoded as UTF-8 with stray continuation bytes, will be transmitted faithfully instead of being re-encoded by the UA.
This example illustrates this encoding for the case with two form controls with the same name. Suppose we have the following form:
<form enctype="application/x-www-form+xml" method="post"> <p> Enter your new password twice: <input type="password" name="password"/> <input type="password" name="password"/> <input type="submit" value="Send"> </p> </form>
If the user enters "perfect" and "prefect", the user agent might send back the following data:
Content-Type: application/x-www-form+xml <submission xmlns=...> <field name="password" index="0">perfect</field> <field name="password" index="1">prefect</field> </submission>
Recall the example for repetition blocks. If it was immediately submitted, the output would be an XML file equivalent to:
Content-Type: application/x-www-form+xml <submission xmlns=...> <repeat template="row" index="0"/> <repeat template="row" index="1"/> <field name="name_0" index="0">John Smith</field> <field name="count_0" index="0">2</field> <field name="name_1" index="0"></field> <field name="count_1" index="0">1</field> </submission>
text/plainThis section defines the expected behaviour for step 5, "Step five:
Encode the form data set", of the submission algorithm described above,
for the form content type text/plain. The rest of the form
submission process progresses as described above.
This content type is more human readable than the others but is not unambiguously parseable. Forms submitted with this content type must be encoded as follows:
accept-charset attribute. UAs must use the encoding that
most completely covers the characters found in the form data set of the
encodings specified. If the attribute is not specified, then the client
should use either the page's character encoding, or, if that cannot
encode all the characters in the form data set, UTF-8.
How a UA establishes the page's character encoding is determined by the language specification (for example, HTML4 section 5.2.2 [HTML4]). It could be explicitly specified by the page, overridden by the user, or auto-detected by the UA.
hidden with the name _charset_, it
is forced to appear in the form data set, with the value equal to the
name of the submission character encoding used.
Note that the control index and repetition block parts of the form data set are not used.
This algorithm does not directly parallel the algorithm for
application/x-www-form-urlencoded. This is mostly due to
backwards compatibility concerns (for both cases).
The exact semantics of the method and enctype
attributes depend on the protocol specified by the action
attribute, in the manner described in this section.
The attributes considered are those of the element that initiated the submission — if the user started the submission then the attributes come from the submit button or image that the user activated; if script started the submission then the attributes of the form are used. If an attribute is missing from a submit button, then the equivalent attribute on the form is used instead.
In the following example:
<form action="test.php" method="post"> <input type="submit"> <input type="submit" method="get"> </form>
The first submit button would submit to the test.php
script using the HTTP POST method, and the second would submit to the
same script but using the HTTP GET method.
The HTTP specification defines various methods that can be used with
HTTP URIs. Four of these may be used as values of the method
attribute: get, post, put, and
delete. In this specification, these method names are applied
to other protocols as well. This section defines how they should be
interpreted.
If the specified method is not one of get,
post, put, or delete then it is
treated as get in the tables below.
If the enctype attribute is not
specified (or is set to the empty string), and the form consists of
exactly one file upload control with exactly one file selected, then in
the tables below, the "File upload" rows must be used. If the form
contains something other than just one file upload control with exactly
one file selected, or if the attribute is specified but has an
unrecognised value, the enctype attribute is treated as if it
was application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
User agents may implement whichever URI schemes are required for their particular application. This specification does not specify a required core set of protocols that must be implemented. For those that are implemented, UAs must use the algorithms given in the following sections when submitting data using those protocols.
What user agents should do when the designated resource is fetched
depends on the value of the replace
attribute. This is described in step eight of
the algorithm.
The value of the enctype attribute
must be dispatched using a case-insensitive literal comparison. The
attribute must therefore not have any MIME parameters. (For example, the
value multipart/form-data;charset=utf-8 must not be treated
as matching multipart/form-data.)
In the tables below, cells that specify that their case should be handled as another represent attribute combinations that are otherwise meaningless. In such cases, the encoded data set is created from the fallback encoding type, not the specified encoding type.
HTTP is described by [RFC2616].
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Use the encoded data set as the query value for a URI formed from
the action attribute and fetch it via HTTP GET.
| Use the encoded data set as the entity body,
with the Content-Type set appropriately, and submit it
using the specified method.
| Ignore the form data set and access action
with the specified method.
| |
| multipart/form-data | Handle as if enctype was
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
| |||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | ||||
| File upload | Use the file content as the entity body, with the
Content-Type set to its MIME type, and submit it using the
specified method.
| |||
ftp:
actionsThe ftp: URI scheme is described by [RFC1738] and FTP itself is described by [RFC959].
Using the FTP protocol for form submission is of dubious value and is discouraged.
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Ignore the form data set and retrieve the file specified
by action (RETR).
| Handle as if method was put.
| Use the encoded data set as the content of a file and
upload it to the location specified by action
(STOR). The response body has no content (equivalent to an
HTTP 204 No Content response.)
| Ignore the form data set and delete the file specified
by action (DELE). The response body has no
content (equivalent to an HTTP 204 No Content response.)
|
| multipart/form-data | ||||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | ||||
| File upload | Upload the selected file to the location specified by the
action attribute (STOR). The response body
has no content (equivalent to an HTTP 204 No Content response.)
|
Using these semantics, a poor man's FTP upload form could be written like so:
<form method="put" xml:base="ftp://ftp.example.com/incoming/">
<p>
<label>
Path:
<input type="text" pattern="[^./][^/]*"
onchange="if (validity == 0) form.action = encodeURIComponent(value)"/>
</label>
<input type="file" name="file"/>
<input type="submit" value="Upload file"/>
</p>
</form>
data:
actionsThe data: URI scheme is described by [RFC2397].
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Ignore the form data set and access the action URI.
| If the action contains the string "%%%%",
URI escape all non-alphanumeric characters in the encoded form data
set, URI escape the result again, and substitute the result for the
first occurrence of the string "%%%%" in the action.
Otherwise, just URI escape the encoded form data set once and
substitute it for the first occurrence of the string "%%" in the
action (if any). Then, access the resulting URI.
| Ignore action; form a new base64-encoded
data: URI from the entity body, using the appropriate MIME type, and
access it.
| Handle as if method was post.
|
| multipart/form-data | Handle as if enctype was
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
| |||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | ||||
| File upload | Ignore action; form a new base64-encoded data: URI from
the selected file's contents, using the file's MIME type, and access
it.
|
If the following form is submitted by pressing the button:
<form action="data:,Data%20was:%20'%%%%'" method="post"> <p><input type="submit" name="x" value="It's a test"> </form>
...it would result in the following URI being used:
data:,Data%20was:%20'x%253DIt%2527s%252Ba%252Btest'
...but if the action was changed to just
data:,Data%20was:%20'%%' (that is, just "%%" instead of
"%%%%") then the URI used would be:
data:,Data%20was:%20'x%3DIt's%2Ba%2Btest'
Note that '%%' is invalid in a URI, so authors should exercise caution
when using the post method with data: URIs.
file: actionsThe file: URI scheme is described by [RFC1738].
For security reasons, untrusted content should never be allowed to
submit or fetch files specified by file
URIs.
The semantics described in this subsection are recommended, but UAs may
implement alternative semantics if desired, as consistent behaviour for
submission to file: URIs is not required
for interoperability on the World Wide Web.
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Ignore the form data set and retrieve the file specified
by action.
| If the specified file is executable, launch the
specified file in an environment that complies with the CGI
Specification [RFC3875], using the encoded
data set as the standard input and the resulting standard output as an
HTTP response entity (see details below). If the specified file is not
executable, handle as if method was get.
| Use the encoded data set as the content of a file and
store it in the location specified by action. The response
body has no content (equivalent to an HTTP 204 No Content response.)
| Ignore the form data set and delete the file specified
by action. The response body has no content (equivalent to
an HTTP 204 No Content response.)
|
| multipart/form-data | ||||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | ||||
| File upload | Same as for other types except the encoded form data set is the contents of the specified file. | Store the selected file at the location specified by the
action URI.
|
The standard output mentioned above for "post" requests should be
handled as an HTTP/1.1 response entity, with a header section and an
entity body section. If the header section contains a header with the name
"Status", its value is appended to the string HTTP/1.1 and
treated as the response status line. Otherwise, the response status line
is assumed to be HTTP/1.1 200 OK. An explicit response status
line if present, is treated as a header, not a status line.
If the standard output of a program executed in this context is:
Content-Type: text/plain Status: 301 Permanent Redirect Location: http://www.example.org/ See http://www.example.org/
...then the UA should handle this exactly as if it had received the following response over an HTTP connection:
HTTP/1.1 301 Permanent Redirect Content-Type: text/plain Location: http://www.example.org/ See http://www.example.org/
If a program in this context returned the following standard output:
'submit.pl' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
...then the UA should handle this as the following HTTP response entity:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK 'submit.pl' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
...which is equivalent to an empty document (since there is no response body).
mailto: actionsThe mailto: URI scheme is described by [RFC2368].
UAs should not send e-mails without the explicit consent of the user.
All submissions made using mailto: result in the equivalent
of an HTTP 204 No Content response. Thus the replace attribute is effectively ignored when
action is a mailto URI.
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Use the encoded data set as the headers part (see [RFC2368]) of a mailto: URI formed
from the action attribute and process that URI.
| Use the encoded data set as the default message body,
with the Content-Type set appropriately, for a message
based on the specified action attribute.
| Handle as if method was
post.
| |
| multipart/form-data | Handle as if enctype was
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
| |||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | ||||
| File upload | Attach the selected file to a message based on the specified
action attribute.
| |||
smsto: and sms: actionsThe smsto: and sms: URI schemes are not yet
specified.
UAs should not send SMSes without the explicit consent of the user.
All submissions made using the smsto: and sms:
URI schemes result in the equivalent of an HTTP 204 No Content response.
Thus the replace attribute is
effectively ignored when enctype is an SMS URI.
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Behaviour
is undefined, pending the release of an smsto: or
sms: specification.
| Use the encoded data set as the default message body for a message
based on the specified action attribute.
| Handle as if method was
post.
| |
| multipart/form-data | Handle as if enctype was
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
| Handle as if enctype was
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
| ||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | Use the encoded data set as the default message body for a message
based on the specified action attribute.
| |||
| File upload | Handle as if enctype was
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
| |||
javascript: actionsThe javascript: URI scheme is described
by [CSJSR]. ECMAScript is defined in [ECMA262].
If the response body of a submission to a javascript:
action is the ECMAScript void type, then it is treated as if
it was an HTTP 204 No Content response.
| get | post | put | delete | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| application/x-www-form-urlencoded | Ignore the form data set and access the URI given by the
action attribute in the current context. The response body
is the return value of the script.
| Encode the form data set by putting each name/value
pair into a newly created object using the names as attributes of that
object and the values as the values of those attributes. Execute the
URI given by the action attribute in the context of the
document after having added the aforementioned object to the start of
the scope chain. Duplicate names should cause the property to become an
array, with each value represented in the array. The response body is
the return value of the script.
| Handle as if method was
post.
| |
| multipart/form-data | ||||
| application/x-www-form+xml | ||||
| text/plain | ||||
| File upload | ||||
There are two scenarios where authors may wish data to be fetched from
an external file to fill forms. In the first, a select's
options are replaced by options from an external file. In the second, a
form's values are prefilled from an external data source.
In both cases, the prefilling may either be full, in which case the previous contents are removed first, or incremental, in which case the fetched data is in addition to the data already in the form.
Implementations may limit which hosts, ports, and schemes can be accessed using these methods. For example, HTTP-based content should not be able to preseed a form based on content from the local file system. Similarly, cross-domain scripting restrictions are fully expected to apply.
select elementsIf a select element or a datalist element being parsed has a data attribute, then as
soon as the element and all its children have been parsed and added to the
document, the prefilling process described here should start.
If a select element or a datalist element has a data
attribute, it must be a URI or IRI that points to a well-formed XML file
whose root element is a select element in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. The MIME type must be
an XML MIME type [RFC3023], preferably
application/xml. It should not be
application/xhtml+xml since the root element is not
html.
UAs must process this file if it has an XML MIME type [RFC3023], if it is a well-formed XML file, and if the root element is the right root element in the right namespace. If any of these conditions are not met, UAs must act as if the attribute was not specified, although they may report the error to the user. UAs are expected to correctly handle namespaces, so the file may use prefixes, etc.
If the UA processes the file, it must use the following algorithm to fill the form.
type attribute
with the exact literal string incremental, the children of
the select or datalist
element in the original document must all be removed from the document.
select element in the
referenced document are imported into the original document and appended
as children of the select or datalist element. (Even if importing into a
text/html document, the newly imported nodes will still be
namespaced.)
select (such as stylesheet
processing instructions, white space text nodes, and
DOCTYPEs) are ignored, as are attributes (other than
type) on the select element.
The prefilling processes for select and datalist elements started during document load
must all be completed before the document's load event can
fire.
If a select or datalist element has its data
attribute manipulated via the DOM, then the prefilling process must start
as soon as any executing scripts have run to completion. If the attribute
is set multiple times during one execution of a script, only the last
request must take effect. If the process is started while an outstanding
prefilling request is still being attended to, the requests must all be
serviced in the order they were started.
The following script has only one possible valid outcome:
var select = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'select');
select.data = 'data:application/xml,<select xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" type="incremental"><option>b</option></select>';
// at this point, select.length == 0 is guaranteed
var option = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'option');
option.appendChild(document.createTextNode('a'));
select.appendChild(option);
// at this point, select.length == 1 is guaranteed
document.documentElement.appendChild(select);
...namely, the insertion at the end of the document of a select widget which, in due course, will have three options, namely "a", "b" and "b".
Before load events are fired, but after the entire document
has been parsed and after select elements have been filled from external data sources (if
necessary), forms with data attributes are prefilled.
In particular, UAs should not specifically wait for images and stylesheets to be loaded before preseeding forms.
If a form has a data attribute, it must be a
URI or IRI that points to a well-formed XML file whose root element is a
formdata element in the XML submission namespace. The MIME
type must be an XML MIME type [RFC3023],
preferably application/xml.
UAs must process this file if these conditions are met. If any of these conditions are not met, UAs must act as if the attribute was not specified, although they may report the error to the user. UAs are expected to correctly handle namespaces, so the file may use prefixes, etc.
If the UA processes the file, it must use the following algorithm to fill the form.
type attribute with the
exact literal string incremental, the form must be reset to
its initial values as specified in the markup.
repeat elements in the XML
submission namespace that are children of the root element, have a
non-empty template attribute and an
index attribute that contains only one or more digits in the
range 0-9 with an optional leading minus sign (U+002D, "-"), have no
other non-namespaced attributes, and have no content, must be processed
as follows:
The template attribute should
contain the ID of an element in the document. If the template attribute specifies an element that
is not a repetition template,
then the repeat element is ignored.
If the template attribute
specifies a repetition template
and that template already has a repetition
block with the index specified by the index
attribute, then the element is ignored.
Otherwise, the specified template's addRepetitionBlockByIndex()
method is called, with a null first argument and the index specified by
the repeat element's
index attribute as the second.
field elements in the XML submission namespace that are
children of the root element, have a non-empty name attribute, either an index
attribute that contains only one or more digits in the range 0-9 or no
index attribute at all, have no other non-namespaced
attributes, and have either nothing or only text and CDATA nodes as
children, must be used to initialize fields, as follows.
First, the form control that the field references must be identified.
This is done by walking the list of form controls associated with the
form until one is found that has a name exactly equal to the name given
in the field element's name attribute, skipping as many such matches as
is specified in the index attribute, or, if the
index attribute was omitted, skipping over any
type="radio" and type="checkbox" controls that
have the exact name given but have a value that is not exactly the same
as the contents of the field element.
For image controls, instead of using
the name given by the name attribute,
the field's name is checked against two names, the first being the value
of the name attribute with the string
.x appended to it, and the second being the same but with
.y appended instead. Thus image controls are handled as if they were two
controls.
If the identified form control is a file upload control, a push button
control, or an image control, then the field element is now
skipped.
Next, if the identified form control is not a multiple-valued control
(a multiple-valued control is one that can generate more than one value
on submission, such as a <select
multiple="multiple">), or if it is a multiple-valued control
but it is the first time the control has been identified by a
field element in this data file that was not ignored, then
it is set to the given value (the contents of the field
element), removing any previous values (even if these values were the
result of processing previous field elements in the same
data file). Otherwise, this is a
subsequent value for a
multiple-valued control, and the given value (the contents of the
field element) should be added to the list of
values that the element has selected.
If the element cannot be given the value specified, the
field element is ignored and the control's value is left
unchanged. For example, if a checkbox has its value attribute set to
green and the field element specifies that its
value should be set to blue, it won't be changed from its
current value. (The only values that would have an effect in this
example are "", which would uncheck the checkbox, and "green", which
would check the checkbox.) Another example would be a datetime control where the specified value
is outside the range allowed by the min
and max attributes. The format must
match the allowed formats for that type for the value to be set.
If the element is a multiple-valued control and the control already has the given value selected, but it can be given the value again, then that occurs. For example, in the following case:
<select name="select" multiple="multiple"> <option>test</option> <option>test</option> <option>test</option> </select>
...if the data file contained two instances of:
<field name="select" index="0">test</field>
...then the first two option elements would end up
selected, and the last would not. This would be the case irrespective of
which option elements had their selected
attribute set in the markup.
The option elements are never directly
matched by field elements; it is the select
element in this case that is matched (twice). This is why the two
field elements select subsequent values in the control.
If the element is a multiple-valued control and the control already has the given value selected and it cannot be given the value again, then the field is ignored.
If the element is a radio button, then setting it to its value resets all the other radio buttons in the group to their unchecked state.
formchange event is then
fired on all the form controls of the form.
All other elements in the file must be ignored. The algorithm must be
processed in the order given above, meaning repeat elements are handled before the
field elements, regardless of the order in which the elements
are given. (Note that this implies that this process cannot be performed
incrementally.)
Note that file upload controls cannot be repopulated.
However, an output control
can be populated. This can be used, for example, for localizing a
form by including the structure in one file and the strings in another.
(The semantics of this practice are somewhat dubious, however. It is only
mentioned because XForms advocates claim this as a feature.)
The form prefilling processes started during document load must all be
completed before the document's load event can fire.
Setting the data attribute dynamically does not cause the
UA to refill the form. The semantics of the data attribute
are only relevant during initial document load, with the form filling
kicked off just as the document has finished being parsed. Thus, as far as
scripted changes to the DOM are concerned, UAs must only prefill forms
with data attributes that are added to the document by script
before the UA has finished parsing the document. The DOM can be used to refill a form after the
document has finishing loading using other methods, however.
Unless otherwise specified, these interfaces have the same semantics as defined in [DOM2HTML].
The interfaces found within this section are mandatory for UAs that
implement this specification and support scripting. A DOM application may
use the hasFeature(feature, version) method of the
DOMImplementation interface with parameter values "WebForms"
and "2.0" (respectively) to determine whether or not this module is
supported by the implementation. User agents may return true for such a
call (full compliance is not required to return true). Please refer to
additional information about conformance in the DOM Level 3 Core
specification. [DOM3CORE]
members of HTMLFormElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute HTMLCollection elements;
readonly attribute long length;
attribute DOMString name;
attribute DOMString acceptCharset;
attribute DOMString action;
attribute DOMString enctype;
attribute DOMString method;
attribute DOMString target;
void submit();
void reset();
// new in this specification:
const unsigned short ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH = 1;
const unsigned short ERROR_RANGE_UNDERFLOW = 2;
const unsigned short ERROR_RANGE_OVERFLOW = 4;
const unsigned short ERROR_STEP_MISMATCH = 8;
const unsigned short ERROR_TOO_LONG = 16;
const unsigned short ERROR_PATTERN_MISMATCH = 32;
const unsigned short ERROR_REQUIRED = 64;
const unsigned short ERROR_CUSTOM = 32768;
attribute DOMString accept;
attribute DOMString replace;
attribute DOMString data;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection templateElements;
bool validate();
void resetFromData(in Document data);
void dispatchFormInput();
void dispatchFormChange();
end.
members of HTMLSelectElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute DOMString type;
attribute long selectedIndex;
attribute DOMString value;
attribute unsigned long length;
// raises(DOMException) on setting
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
readonly attribute HTMLOptionsCollection options;
attribute boolean disabled;
attribute boolean multiple;
attribute DOMString name;
attribute long size;
attribute long tabIndex;
void add(in HTMLElement element,
in HTMLElement before)
raises(DOMException);
void remove(in long index);
void blur();
void focus();
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
attribute boolean autocomplete;
attribute boolean autofocus;
attribute DOMString data;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection selectedOptions;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection labels;
readonly attribute boolean willValidate;
readonly attribute ValidityState validity;
readonly attribute DOMString validationMessage;
bool validate();
void setCustomValidity(in DOMString error);
void dispatchChanged();
void dispatchFormChanged();
end.
interface HTMLDataListElement : HTMLElement {
readonly attribute HTMLOptionsCollection options;
};
members of HTMLOptGroupElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
attribute boolean disabled;
attribute DOMString label;
end.
members of HTMLOptionElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
attribute boolean defaultSelected;
readonly attribute DOMString text;
readonly attribute long index;
attribute boolean disabled;
attribute DOMString label;
attribute boolean selected;
attribute DOMString value;
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
end.
members of HTMLInputElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
attribute DOMString defaultValue;
attribute boolean defaultChecked;
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
attribute DOMString accept;
attribute DOMString accessKey;
attribute DOMString align;
attribute DOMString alt;
attribute boolean checked;
attribute boolean disabled;
attribute long maxLength;
attribute DOMString name;
attribute boolean readOnly;
attribute unsigned long size;
attribute DOMString src;
attribute long tabIndex;
attribute DOMString type;
attribute DOMString useMap;
attribute DOMString value;
void blur();
void focus();
void select();
void click();
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
attribute DOMString min;
attribute DOMString max;
attribute DOMString step;
attribute DOMString pattern;
attribute boolean required;
attribute boolean autocomplete;
attribute boolean autofocus;
attribute DOMString inputmode;
attribute DOMString action;
attribute DOMString enctype;
attribute DOMString method;
attribute DOMString target;
attribute DOMString replace;
readonly attribute HTMLElement list;
readonly attribute HTMLOptionElement selectedOption;
readonly attribute RepetitionElement htmlTemplate;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection labels;
attribute DOMTimeStamp valueAsDate;
attribute float valueAsNumber;
void stepUp(in int n);
void stepDown(in int n);
readonly attribute boolean willValidate;
readonly attribute ValidityState validity;
readonly attribute DOMString validationMessage;
bool validate();
void setCustomValidity(in DOMString error);
void dispatchChanged();
void dispatchFormChanged();
end.
members of HTMLTextAreaElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
attribute DOMString defaultValue;
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
attribute DOMString accessKey;
attribute long cols;
attribute boolean disabled;
attribute DOMString name;
attribute boolean readOnly;
attribute long rows;
attribute long tabIndex;
readonly attribute DOMString type;
attribute DOMString value;
void blur();
void focus();
void select();
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
attribute DOMString wrap;
attribute DOMString pattern;
attribute boolean required;
attribute boolean autocomplete;
attribute boolean autofocus;
attribute DOMString inputmode;
attribute long maxLength;
attribute DOMString accept;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection labels;
readonly attribute boolean willValidate;
readonly attribute ValidityState validity;
readonly attribute DOMString validationMessage;
bool validate();
void setCustomValidity(in DOMString error);
void dispatchChanged();
void dispatchFormChanged();
end.
members of HTMLButtonElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
attribute DOMString accessKey;
attribute boolean disabled;
attribute DOMString name;
attribute long tabIndex;
attribute DOMString value;
// modified in this specification
attribute DOMString type;
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
attribute DOMString action;
attribute DOMString enctype;
attribute DOMString method;
attribute DOMString replace;
attribute boolean autofocus;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection labels;
readonly attribute RepetitionElement htmlTemplate;
void blur();
void focus();
readonly attribute boolean willValidate;
readonly attribute ValidityState validity;
readonly attribute DOMString validationMessage;
bool validate();
void setCustomValidity(in DOMString error);
void dispatchChanged();
void dispatchFormChanged();
end.
members of HTMLLabelElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
attribute DOMString accessKey;
attribute DOMString htmlFor;
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
readonly attribute Element control;
end.
members of HTMLFieldSetElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
// new in this specification
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection elements;
attribute boolean disabled;
end.
members of HTMLLegendElement (which inherits from HTMLElement) are:
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
attribute DOMString accessKey;
attribute DOMString align;
// new in this specification:
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
end.
// new in this specification
interface HTMLOutputElement : HTMLElement {
attribute DOMString defaultValue;
readonly attribute HTMLFormElement form;
readonly attribute NodeList forms;
attribute DOMString name;
attribute DOMString value;
readonly attribute boolean willValidate; // always false
readonly attribute ValidityState validity; // all members always set to false
readonly attribute DOMString validationMessage; // always the empty string
bool validate(); // returns true
void setCustomValidity(in DOMString error); // raises NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR
};
// new in this specification
members of RepetitionElement are:
const unsigned short REPETITION_NONE = 0;
const unsigned short REPETITION_TEMPLATE = 1;
const unsigned short REPETITION_BLOCK = 2;
attribute unsigned short repetitionType;
attribute long repetitionIndex;
readonly attribute Element repetitionTemplate;
readonly attribute HTMLCollection repetitionBlocks;
attribute unsigned long repeatStart;
attribute unsigned long repeatMin;
attribute unsigned long repeatMax;
Element addRepetitionBlock(in Node refNode);
Element addRepetitionBlockByIndex(in Node refNode, in long index);
void moveRepetitionBlock(in long distance);
void removeRepetitionBlock();
end.
// new in this specification
interface ValidityState {
readonly attribute boolean isTypeMismatch;
readonly attribute boolean isRangeUnderflow;
readonly attribute boolean isRangeOverflow;
readonly attribute boolean isTooLong;
readonly attribute boolean isPatternMismatch;
readonly attribute boolean isRequired;
readonly attribute boolean isCustom;
};
HTMLFormElement interfaceThe new accept attribute reflects
the form element's accept
attribute and its addition here merely addresses an oversight in DOM2.
The elements array must contain all the input,
output, select,
textarea and button elements that are associated with the form except those
that have a repetition template as an ancestor.
There is one exception. The elements array is defined to
not include image controls (input elements of type image). This is for backwards compatibility with
DOM Level 0. This excludes image buttons from several features of this
specification, such as onformchange processing and
validation.
The templateElements attribute contains the list of form
controls associated with this form that form part of repetition templates.
It is defined in more detail in the section on the repetition model. (Image controls are
part of this array, when appropriate.)
The controls in the elements and
templateElements lists must be in document order.
The form.validate() method
shall make a list of all the elements in the form's elements
list whose interfaces have a validate() method defined and a willValidate attribute defined, and whose
willValidate attribute has the
true value, then shall invoke the validate() method on all the elements in that
list. It shall return the logical-and of all the return values (i.e. it
returns false if any of the form controls have willValidate set to true but are invalid).
See the section on form validation for
details regarding the resulting events.
The reset() method resets the form, then fires a a formchange event on all the form controls of
the form.
The resetFromData() method takes one
argument, a Document to use for resetting the form. If this
argument is null, the method does nothing. Otherwise, the algorithm
described in the section on seeding a form with initial
values must be run with the given document instead of the document
mentioned in the data attribute.
The dispatchFormChange()
and dispatchFormInput()
methods cause formchange and
forminput events (respectively) to
be fired to all the controls in the elements array, much like
what happens for the default action of change and
input events.
In the ECMAScript binding, objects that implement the
HTMLFormElement interface reflect their elements
according to the following semantics:
If a name is used by more than one control, the form object has a
property of that name that references a NodeList interface
that lists the controls of that name.
If a name is used by exactly one control, the form object has a property of that name that references that control.
HTMLSelectElement interfaceThe selectedOptions
attribute provides a readonly list of the descendent
HTMLOptionElement nodes that currently have their
selected attribute set to a true value (a subset of the
controls listed in the options attribute). The list is
returned live, so changing the options selected (by the user or by script)
will change the list. The order of the list should be consistent with the
order of the options list.
HTMLDataListElement interfaceThe options element returns the same as
getElementsByTagName() would return if called on the same
element, with option as the argument (or, in XHTML, if the
namespaced version was called with the same tag name but with the XHTML
namespace).
HTMLOptionElement interfaceThe index DOM attribute is
redefined to be the index of the element in the options list
of its nearest ancestor implementing the HTMLSelectElement or
HTMLDataListElement interface. If there is no such ancestor,
or if the element is not in that list, the index
attribute must return -1.
In addition to adding datalist to the definition, this also corrects
an ambiguity in DOM2 HTML's definition of the attribute: it was undefined
if the parent was not a select element.
HTMLFieldsetElement interfaceThe new elements attribute lists the form controls under
the fieldset, regardless of which form they belong to. The
array must contain all the input, output, select,
textarea and button controls that have the
fieldset element as an ancestor, in document order.
HTMLOutputElement interfaceThis interface is added for the new output element. Its attributes work analogously
to those on other controls. The semantics of the value and
defaultValue DOM attributes are described in the section
describing the output element.
The willValidate attribute of
a form control element must return true if all of the following conditions
are met:
datalist element as an ancestor.
button,
reset, add, remove, move-up, or move-down.
output
element.
It must return false if any of these conditions are not met.
The validity attribute returns an
object that represents whether the form control is currently valid. In the
ECMAScript binding, this object acts as if it was a number whose value is
a bit field giving the errors that currently apply ot the control, which
must be equal to the sum of the relevant ERROR_* constants
defined on the HTMLFormElement interface. (This is achieved
by implementing a custom [[DefaultValue]]
method on the prototype of objects that implement the ValidityState interface. See ECMA262,
section 8.6.2.6. [ECMA262]) These have the
following meanings:
month fields, and the user has entered
SEP02, then this error code would be used. This code is also
used when the selected file in a file upload control does not have an
appropriate MIME type. If the control is empty, this flag will not be
set.
min attribute is lower than the minimum, or a file
upload control has fewer files selected than the minimum. If the control
is empty or if the ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH flag is set,
this flag will not be set.
max attribute is higher than the maximum, or a
file upload control has more files selected than the maximum. If the
control is empty or if the ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH flag is set,
this flag will not be set.
step attribute, and the UA will not be rounding
the value for submission. Empty values and values that caused the
ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH flag to
be set can never cause this flag to be set.
maxlength attribute is longer than the
attribute allows.
pattern attribute doesn't match the pattern.
If the control is empty, this flag will not be set.
required
attribute set but has no value.
setCustomValiditiy() method.
When the definitions above refer to elements that have an attribute set
on them, they do not refer to elements on which that attribute is defined
not to apply. For example, the ERROR_REQUIRED code cannot be set on an
<input type="checkbox"> element, even if that element
has the required attribute set,
since required doesn't apply to
checkboxes.
For example, the following control:
<input type="text" name="test" pattern="[a-z]+" maxlength="3" value="abc123">
...would be flagged as both ERROR_TOO_LONG (16) and ERROR_PATTERN_MISMATCH (32),
meaning the validity flag would have
a value of 48 (16+32=48).
The ValidityState interface
defines the following attributes, which must return true if their
associated bit is true, and false otherwise:
ERROR_TYPE_MISMATCH
flag is set.
ERROR_RANGE_UNDERFLOW
flag is set.
ERROR_RANGE_OVERFLOW
flag is set.
ERROR_STEP_MISMATCH
flag is set.
ERROR_TOO_LONG flag is
set.
ERROR_PATTERN_MISMATCH
flag is set.
ERROR_REQUIRED flag
is set.
ERROR_CUSTOM flag is
set.
Assistive technologies should use the willValidate and validity DOM attributes to determine which
controls are in need of user attention when submission fails due to a
validity problem.
The validate() method, present on
several of the form control interfaces, causes an invalid event to be fired on that control,
unless the validity of the control is
zero. It returns true if the validity
of the control is zero, otherwise it returns false. Recall that this is automatically done during form submission.
The setCustomValidity() method sets
and resets the ERROR_CUSTOM bit on
the validity attribute. If the
method's argument is null or the empty string,
then the bit is reset (indicating that the control is valid), otherwise
the given value is recorded and the bit is set (the control is not valid).
Even form controls that are empty and not required can be marked invalid
like this, and would abort form submission if so marked. Setting this bit
is persistent, in that the bit remains set (and the string that was passed
is remembered) until specifically unset using the same method. For
instance, resetting the form, changing the control value, or moving the
element around the document do not affect the value of this bit. The
string passed to this method should be used by the UA when the UA needs to
report the control as having a custom error to the user.
The validationMessage
attribute shall be the empty string if the control is valid, and shall
contain a suitably localised message that the UA would be giving the user
if the form was submitted, if the control is invalid. If the only error
with the form control is a custom error, then the string returned shall be
the string that was passed to the setCustomValidity() method.
On the HTMLOutputElement interface, the willValidate attribute must return false,
the validity attribute must return an
object with all its attributes set to false (and, in the ECMAScript
binding, the value 0), the validityMessage attribute must
return the empty string, the validate() method must return true, and the
setCustomValidity() method
must raise a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR DOM exception.
The HTMLOutputElement implements these attributes and
methods so that when iterating over the form's elements
array, authors do not have to ensure that each form element is not an
output element before using them.
The new data, pattern,
required, autocomplete, autofocus, inputmode, min, max, step, wrap,
disabled, accept, action,
enctype, method, replace, and target attributes
simply reflect the current value of their relevant content attribute. If
the attribute is not specified or has an invalid value, then the DOM
attribute reflects the default value.
The disabled attribute of form
controls is not affected by the disabled attributes of ancestors. (Thus the
disabled attribute of a form control
can be false even though the control is disabled by a parent
element.)
The type attribute on the HTMLButtonElement
interface is changed from read-only to read-write. That interface is also
given the focus() and blur() methods.
The forms attribute on most of the
control interfaces is a live read-only NodeList, which shall
contain the forms that the control is associated with, as determined by,
and in the order given by, the form content attribute, or, if there is no form attribute, the
element's ancestors.
The form attribute
on most of the control interfaces is read-only, and shall return the first
entry in the forms list, unless that
list is empty, in which case it returns null.
The forms and form DOM attributes are live,
so that adding a form with an ID that was previously listed in a control's
form content
attribute, for example, will cause that control to be associated with that
form, and that form to appear in the DOM attributes.
For HTMLOptionElements and HTMLLegendElements
the forms and form DOM attributes shall reflect the attributes
of their respective HTMLSelectElements or
HTMLFieldSetElements, if they have one, and shall return null
and empty (respectively) if they don't.
HTMLInputElement interfaceThe list attribute
is read-only, and reflects the current state of the list content attribute. That is, it returns the
same as getElementById() would if passed the value of the
list attribute, if that element
is either an (X)HTML select or datalist element.
The input element's selectedOption DOM attribute is
non-null only if the datalist DOM attribute is non-null and the
input element's value DOM attribute is equal to
the value of one of the list's
option descendants, in which case it points to that
option element.
The valueAsDate attribute
returns the value DOM attribute, converted to
DOMTimeStamp. The control's value must be interpreted as
appropriate for the given type, then converted to a
DOMTimeStamp as follows:
datetime
date
time
week
month
datetime-local)
NaN or an equivalent value representing an invalid
date in the given language binding.
The valueAsNumber attribute
returns the value DOM attribute, converted to
float. The control's value must be converted as follows:
datetime, date, month,
week, time
valueAsDate attribute in terms of
milliseconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC.
datetime-local
Two new methods, stepUp() and stepDown(), enable authors to write code
that increases and decreases (respectively) the value of the control in
integral increments of the given step
value. The argument specifies the number of steps by which to increase or
decrease the value. If the control's value is invalid or empty, if the
step attribute has the value
any, or if the control is not a date-related, time-related,
or numeric type, then the methods shall raise an
INVALID_STATE_ERR exception. If a particular invocation of
the method would invalidate the value (for example, if
stepUp(1) is called when the control's value is less than
step from max), then the method shall raise an
INVALID_MODIFICATION_ERR exception. If the argument passed is
zero, then the method shall raise an INDEX_SIZE_ERR
exception.
Setting a control's value DOM attribute dynamically in such
a way that it makes the control invalid because the value doesn't conform
to the syntax required by the type given in the type
attribute must set the control to the value that the control would have
had if it had never been given an explicit value.
Setting a control's value DOM attribute dynamically in such
a way that it makes the control invalid because the value doesn't conform
to the attributes setting constraints on the value, however, must cause
the control to be set to the new value, and the control becoming invalid.
(For example setting the value of a text field to a string that is longer
than the maxlength attribute
specifies would set the control to that long value, but then prevent
submission.) If the control cannot be set to that value (for example, a
range control cannot represent values outside its range) then the value
must be clamped to the nearest value that can be represented by the
control.
defaultValue DOM attributeFor HTMLInputElement objects, the defaultValue
DOM attribute must always mirror the value content
attribute, both on getting and setting. Setting the
value content attribute or the defaultValue DOM
attribute must reset the value DOM attribute to the new
default value unless the value DOM attribute for the
element has been explicitly set by script or via user edits.
For HTMLTextareaElement objects, the
defaultValue DOM attribute must always mirror the
textContent DOM attribute, both on getting and setting (so
setting defaultValue changes the child nodes of the
textarea element, and changing the child nodes of the element
changes the defaultValue DOM attribute). Changing the child
nodes of the textarea element, the textContent
DOM attribute, or the defaultValue DOM attribute must not
affect the value DOM attribute, even if the user has not
changed the value.
Form controls all have a labels DOM
attribute that lists all the label elements that refer to the
control (either through the for attribute or via
containership), in document order.
Similarly, HTMLLabelElements have a control DOM attribute that points to the
associated element node, if any.
A label must be listed in the labels
list of the control to which its control attribute points, and no other.
Assistive technologies may use the labels attribute to determine what label to
read out when a control is focused. An assistive technology could also
wish to determine if the element is in a fieldset group. To
do so, it should walk up the element's parentNode chain to
find the fieldset ancestors.
The dispatchChanged() and dispatchFormChanged()
methods must cause change and formchange events to be fired on the
element. They are intended primarily to be used from oninput
and onforminput handlers to avoid code duplication:
<input oninput="dispatchChanged()" onchange="some long algorithm">
The changed event fired by the dispatchFormChanged() method must have the same default
action as when that event is fired by the UA.
The dispatchFormChanged() method on
form controls does not fire the event on all the controls like
the dispatchFormChanged() method on the
HTMLFormElement interface.
The RepetitionElement
interface must be implemented by all elements.
If the element is a repetition
template, its repetitionType DOM attribute must
return REPETITION_TEMPLATE.
Otherwise, if the element is a repetition
block, it must return REPETITION_BLOCK. Otherwise,
it is a normal element, and that attribute should return
REPETITION_NONE.
Setting repetitionType
modifies the repeat
attribute. The repeat
attribute's namespace depends on the element node's namespace; if the
element is in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace then
the attribute has no namespace, otherwise the attribute is in
that namespace. If repetitionType is set to
REPETITION_NONE, the attribute is removed. If it is set to
REPETITION_TEMPLATE, the
attribute is set to "template". If
repetitionType is set to
REPETITION_BLOCK, the repeat content attribute is set to the value of
the repetitionIndex DOM
attribute.
The repetitionIndex
attribute must return the current value of the index of the repetition
template or block. If the element is a repetition block, setting this
attribute must update the repeat
attribute appropriately (and changing the attribute directly must affect
the value of the repetitionIndex attribute). Otherwise,
if the element is a repetition template, setting this attribute changes
the template's index but does not affect any other aspect of the DOM. If
the element is a normal element, it must always return zero, and setting
the attribute must have no effect.
The repetitionTemplate
attribute is null unless the element is a repetition block, in which case
it points to the block's template. If the block is an orphan
repetition block then it returns null.
The repetitionBlocks
attribute is null unless the element is a repetition template, in which
case it points to a list of elements (an HTMLCollection,
although the name of that interface is a misnomer since there is nothing
HTML-specific about it). The list consists of all the repetition
blocks that have this element as their template. The list is live.
The repeatStart, repeatMin, and repeatMax DOM attribute must reflect the
values of the repeat-start,
repeat-min, and repeat-max attributes respectively, those
attributes being in no namespace if the element is in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace, and the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace if the element is in
another namespace. If those attributes are absent or do not have valid
values, then the DOM attributes return their default values (1, 0, and the
largest value that an unsigned long can hold, respectively).
Setting the DOM attributes sets the relevant content attributes, unless
the DOM attributes are set to their default values, in which case it
removes the content attributes.
The addRepetitionBlock(),
addRepetitionBlockByIndex(),
moveRepetitionBlock() and
removeRepetitionBlock()
methods are defined in the section on the
repetition model.
The htmlTemplate DOM attribute on the
HTMLInputElement and HTMLButtonElement
interfaces represents the repetition template that the template content attribute refers to. If the
content attribute points to a non-existent element or an element that is
not a repetition template, the DOM attribute returns null. This DOM
attribute is readonly in this version of this specification.
The CSS working group is expected to develop a language designed, amongst other things, for the advanced styling of form controls. In the meantime, technologies such as [HTC] and [XBL] can be used as guides for what is expected.
UAs, in the absence of such advanced styling information, may render form controls described in this draft as they wish. It is recommended that form controls remain faithful to the look and feel of the system's global user interface.
CSS 2.1 explicitly does not define how CSS applies to form controls. [CSS21]
CSS3 UI introduces a number of pseudo-classes for form controls. [CSS3UI] Their relationship to the form controls described in this specification is described here.
fieldsets that do not
have the disabled attribute set and
that do not have any ancestor fieldset elements with their
disabled attribute set, and that are
not implicitly disabled (e.g. move-up
buttons can be implicitly disabled in certain cases).
fieldsets that have
their disabled attribute set or that
have any ancestor fieldset elements with their
disabled attribute set, or that are
implicitly disabled (e.g. move-up
buttons can be implicitly disabled in certain cases).
checked.
invalid event fired at them if the form was
submitted.
invalid event fired at them if the form was
submitted.
required attribute set.
required attribute set.
readonly attribute set, and to which the
readonly attribute applies. (For
instance, radio buttons will never match this, regardless of the value of
the attribute.)
readonly attribute set (including password fields, although technically they
should be called "writeonly"), or to which the attribute doesn't apply
(such as radio buttons).
When the definitions above refer to elements that have an attribute set
on them, they do not refer to elements on which that attribute is defined
not to apply. For example, the :read-only attribute cannot
apply to a <input type="radio"> element, even if that
element has the readonly attribute
set, since readonly doesn't apply to
radio buttons.
This section is non-normative.
The Web Forms 2.0 Module provides all of the forms features found in HTML 4.0, plus the extensions described above. The form control elements and attributes of that the Web Forms 2.0 Module supports are:
| Elements | Attributes | Minimal Content Model |
|---|---|---|
| form | Common, accept (ContentTypes), accept-charset (Charsets), action (URI), enctype (ContentType), method ("get"* | "post" | "put" | "delete"), replace ("document"* | "values") | Flow* |
| input | Common, accept (ContentTypes), accesskey (Character), action (URI), alt (Text), autocomplete ("on"* | "off"), autofocus ("autofocus"), checked ("checked"), disabled ("disabled"), enctype (ContentType), form (IDREF), inputmode (CDATA), list (IDREF), maxlength (Number), method ("get" | "post" | "put" | "delete"), min (CDATA), max (CDATA), name (CDATA), pattern (CDATA), step (CDATA), readonly ("readonly"), replace ("document" | "values") required ("required"), size (Number), src (URI), tabindex (Number), template (IDREF), type ("text"* | "password" | "checkbox" | "radio" | "button" | "submit" | "reset" | "add" | "remove" | "move-up" | "move-down" | "file" | "hidden" | "image" | "datetime" | "datetime-local" | "date" | "month" | "week" | "time" | "number" | "range" | "email" | "uri"), value (CDATA) | EMPTY |
| select | Common, accesskey (Character), autocomplete ("on"* | "off"), autofocus ("autofocus"), data (URI), disabled ("disabled"), form (IDREF),, multiple ("multiple"), name (CDATA), size (Number), tabindex (Number) | (optgroup | option)* |
| datalist | Common, data (URI), | (option | Flow)* |
| optgroup | Common, disabled ("disabled"), label* (Text) | (optgroup | option)* |
| option | Common, disabled ("disabled"), label (Text), selected ("selected"), value (CDATA) | PCDATA |
| textarea | Common, accept (ContentType), accesskey (Character), autocomplete ("on"* | "off"), autofocus ("autofocus"), cols (Number), disabled ("disabled"), form (IDREF), inputmode (CDATA), maxlength (Number), name (CDATA), readonly ("readonly"), required ("required"), rows (Number), tabindex (Number), wrap ("soft"* | "hard") | PCDATA |
| output | Common, for (IDREFS), form (IDREF), name (CDATA) | (PCDATA | Inline)* |
| button | Common, accesskey (Character), action (URI), disabled ("disabled"), enctype (ContentType), form (IDREF), method ("get" | "post" | "put" | "delete"), name (CDATA), replace ("document" | "values") tabindex (Number), template (IDREF), type ("button" | "submit"* | "reset" | "add" | "remove" | "move-up" | "move-down"), value (CDATA) | (PCDATA | Heading | List | Block - Form | Inline - Formctrl)* |
| fieldset | Common, disabled ("disabled"), form (IDREF) | (PCDATA | legend | Flow)* |
| legend | Common, accesskey (Character) | (PCDATA | Inline)* |
| label | Common, accesskey (Character), for (IDREF) | (PCDATA | Inline - label)* |
This module defines two content sets:
When this module is used, it adds the Form content set to
the Block content set and it adds the Formctrl
content set to the Inline content set as these are defined in
the Text Module.
All XHTML elements (all elements in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace) may have the
repeat, repeat-start, repeat-min, and repeat-max attributes specified.
Similarly, the global attributes repeat, repeat-start, repeat-min, and repeat-max in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace may be specified on
any non-XHTML element. The repeat
attribute must either have the value "template" or be an integer (an optional '-'
character followed by one or more decimal digits). The other attributes
must have a non-negative integer value (one or more digits 0-9).
The form element may be placed inside XHTML
head elements when it is empty.
Warning. XML documents using the new repetition model with the index substitution feature on ID attributes cannot validate, as the "[" and "]" characters are not valid in IDs in XML.
The oninput attribute is added to all the elements that
have an onchange attribute in the XHTML Intrinsic Events
module. The onformchange and onforminput
attributes are added to all form control elements (including output). The oninvalid attribute
is added to all form controls except output elements. The onchange
attribute (but not oninput) is added to the output element.
When frames and multiple windows are also allowed, the
target attribute is added to the input and
button elements.
The Web Forms 2.0 Module is a superset of the Forms and Basic Forms
modules. These modules may not be used together in a single document type.
Note that the content models in this module differ from those of the
XHTML1 Forms module in some subtle ways (for example, the
select element may be empty).
The input element takes a large number of attributes that
do not always apply. The following table summarizes which attributes apply
to which input types.
type
| text
| password
| checkbox radio
| button
| submit
| reset
| add
| remove move-up move-down
| file
| hidden
| image
| datetime datetime-local date month
week time
| number range
| email
uri
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
accept
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - |
accesskey
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
action
| - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
alt
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
autocomplete
| Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | Yes | Yes |
autofocus
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
checked
| - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
disabled
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
enctype
| - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
form
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
inputmode
| Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes |
list
| Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | Yes | Yes |
maxlength
| Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | Yes |
method
| - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
min
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | Yes | Yes | - |
max
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | Yes | Yes | - |
name
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
pattern
| Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes |
step
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | Yes | - |
readonly
| Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | Yes | Yes |
replace
| - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
required
| Yes | Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | Yes | Yes | Yes |
size
| Yes | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
src
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
tabindex
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
target
| - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - |
template
| - | - | - | - | - | - | Yes | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
value
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The following features are deprecated by this specification:
Documents must not use deprecated features. User agents should support deprecated features.
The WHAT working group charter requires that for this specification to be considered interoperably implemented, the tests for each feature must be passed by two implementations. The features of this specification are, for the purpose of testing interoperability:
All references are normative unless specified otherwise.
This work is the direct result of discussion on the WHATWG public mailing list.
Thanks to Alan Plum, Alexander J. Vincent, Andrew Clover, Andrew Smith, Andy Heydon, Anne van Kesteren, Anthony Boyd, Ave Wrigley, Bert Bos, Bill McCoy, Björn Höhrmann, Brad Fults, Brendan Eich, Brian Wilson, C. Williams, Chris Morris, Christian Biesinger, Christian Schmidt, Christopher Aillon, Craig Cockburn, Csaba Gabor, Daniel Bratell, Daniel Brooks, Dave Hodder, David Baron, David E. Cleary, David Hyatt, David Matja, Dean Edwards, dolphinling, Doron Rosenberg, Edmund Lai, Edward Welbourne, fantasai, Gytis Jakutonis, Håkon Wium Lie, Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen, Henri Sivonen, Ian Bicking, James Graham, Jason Kersey, Jason Lustig, Jens Lindström, Jim Ley, Joe Gregorio, John Keiser, Johnny Stenback, Jon Ferraiolo, Jonas Sicking, Jonny Axelsson, Jorunn Danielsen Newth, Jukka K. Korpela, Justin Sinclair, Lachlan Hunt, Laurens Holst, Maciej Stachowiak, Mark Birbeck, Mark Nottingham, Mark Schenk, Mark Wilton-Jones, Martijn Wargers, Martin Honnen, Martin Kutschker, Matthew Mastracci, Matthew Thomas, Mattias Waldau, Max Romantschuk, Menno van Slooten, Micah Dubinko, Michael A. Nachbaur, Michael Daskalov, Michael Enright, Mike Shaver, Neil Rashbrook, Olav Junker Kjær, Olli Pettay, Paul Norman, Peter Stark, Peter-Paul Koch, Rene Stach, Rich Doughty, Rigo Wenning, Sander van Lambalgen, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, Shanti Rao, Sigbjørn Vik, Simon Montagu, Stuart Ballard, Subramanian Peruvemba, Susan Borgrink, Tantek Çelik, Ted Mielczarek, voracity, Will Levine, and Wladimir Palant for their comments, both large and small. Thanks to the W3C QA Working Group for providing useful guidelines for specification authors. Thanks also to the Slashdot, Mozillazine, and My Opera communities for some ideas, and to the #mozilla crew, the #opera crew, and the #mrt crew for their ideas and support.
The editor would like to convey very special thanks to Malcolm Rowe and Matthew Raymond for their help fielding comments in the WHATWG mailing list.
There is a W3C Team Comment regarding this Submission. The W3C Team looks forward to working with the submitters to build consensus on unified approaches to forms and related Web technologies. The W3C Team and the submitters are currently investigating methods for collaboration. Below is a summary of recommendations to the submitters: