Re: Forms and Tables

Dave Raggett (dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Thu, 9 Feb 95 08:23:53 EST

> So I would like to have a discussion about how FORMs and TABLEs should
> interact, an issue not addressed in the current proposed HTML 3.0 spec.
> If this list is not a good forum for such a discussion, could someone
> point me to a better one?

The spec defines that you can have a FORM element inside a TABLE
and a TABLE element inside a FORM element. What is forbidden is
putting the start tag for a FORM inside a table and its corresponding
end tag after the table has ended, as this violates element nesting.

One open issue is whether we should permit people to use form fields
without an enclosing FORM element. This would presumably use default
values such as the URL of the enclosing document. What do people think?

Right now, HTML 2.0 and 3.0 share the same mechanism for specifying forms:

<!ELEMENT FORM - - %body.content -(FORM) +(INPUT|SELECT|TEXTAREA)>

This says you can't nest forms and that the form fields are allowed
anywhere inside body content, inside a FORM element. The approach used
in HTML+ is perhaps more elegant and restricts form fields to be peers
of character markup and IMG. It however, requires browsers to provide
defaults for missing FORM elements ...

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> tel: +44 117 922 8046 fax: +44 117 922 8924
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Filton Road, Bristol BS12 6QZ, United Kingdom