[Bug 6834] New: add more number bases to form inputs?

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6834

           Summary: add more number bases to form inputs?
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
               URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/single-page/
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P4
         Component: HTML 5: The Markup Language
        AssignedTo: mike@w3.org
        ReportedBy: Nick_Levinson@yahoo.com
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: public-html@w3.org


For form input type states, either number base extensibility or at least some
discrete number bases other than 10 should be added, although the prime
audience might be limited to IT professionals. The relevant states are number
and range, in sections 4.10.4.1.12 and 4.10.4.1.13, respectively, in
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/single-page/>, Working Draft 12 February 2009, as
accessed 4-19-09.

If specifying and implementing extensibility to any positive integer base are
feasible, an approach would be to add two new states, number-baseful and
range-baseful, to incorporate the existing states number and range into the new
states as special cases that are largely predefined, to let a page author
specify whether all characters are legal or only certain characters (or none)
in addition to those needed for possible valid numbers, to strip or ignore
certain substrings usually used to identify a number base (e.g., 0x, b, h, or
leading 0 or, with more difficulty, trailing subscript n) for sortation, to
sort based on the new fields starting at the rightmost character before the dot
(unlike for text) with accommodation for what is to the right of the dot
including extended notation regardless of base, to base sorting on the
characters listed by the page author in the intended sort order (including
ordinary digits), and to let the page author specify whether sorting would be
case-insensitive (it usually is for hex but not for base-85). The valid
floating point number described in section 2.4.3.3 is base-10, so its
definition would have to be extended or complemented.

If extensibility is not worth the complexity, discrete bases 2, 8, 16, and 85
might be good candidates, if for base 85 using character representations in
lieu of the less-than and greater-than angle brackets is workable in such a
field (the angle brackets are specified in RFC 1924, section 4.2). If
discreteness is preferred, the new states could be number-2, range-2,
number-16, and so on, with each field having its characteristics predefined.

Thank you.

-- 
Nick


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Received on Monday, 20 April 2009 09:47:38 UTC