2010/10/5 Ryosuke Niwa
<rniwa@webkit.org>
On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 3:18 PM, James Su
<james.su@gmail.com> wrote:
Though this property is useful in some situation, it's very confusing regarding to its real purpose. If I understand correctly, this property is mostly used for restricting the input character set of an input box.
Not quite. This property is used to assist users typing in the correct IME mode. For example, when a CJK user types in names, he/she wants to type in characters as supposed to Latin alphabets so the user needs to active IME manually. But websites can assist him/her by enabling IME automatically in such an input element.
The ime-mode property is also very problematic for this purpose:
1. Activating/deactivating the IME is a very special concept only available on Windows, and may not suitable for other platforms.
2. "disabled" makes no sense for this purpose.
3. IMO, it's more like a hint instead of a mandatory restriction. The user should have right to override it.
So for this purpose, I still think having an explicit attribute to hint the desired character set of an input element is better than ime-mode solution. So that the UA can decide the proper action for it.