Most of this is great, except for the input/datalist bits, which are not sufficiently functional to be used in any real scenario. Users expect these interfaces to be tolerant of misspellings, optional sub text under each option, mobile ux niceties, etc -- and so everyone builds this with js...

▲ kmoser 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My main beef with datalist is that there's no easy way to show and allow only text (e.g. Beverly Hills), but have the actual value selected be a number (e.g. 90210). In other words there's no analogy to <option value="90210">Beverly Hills</option>.

▲ tosti 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That and there's no HTML way to interactively load results. Or are you really going to serialize half a million records to HTML and transfer it all every time the relevant block is added to a page? What if it sits in the header or footer templates?

	▲	_heimdall 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This would be possible in XSLT, if only browsers would implement the latest spec rather than abandoning it all together.
	▲	6510 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Right, I sort of expected there to be an attribute for an url. `<datalist json="search.php?q=toyota+corolla">` But then you would want to send other form values along with it which might make things more complicated than it should be? Static could be better too. When search engines first started building these auto complete dropdowns the multi word input was really the killer feature. To have something like "green toyota" you would have to generate an element for all color and brand combinations? And the you want it to work for "green toyota corolla" and you get an abc kind of list length. Perhaps a wildcard would have been fun or regex options. `<option value="* days"></option> <option value="* weeks"></option> <option value="* years"></option>`

▲ swiftcoder 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Each <option> element should have a value attribute... It can also have a label attribute, or, missing that, some text content, which may be displayed by the browser instead of value (Firefox), or in addition to value (Chrome and Safari)... The exact content of the drop-down menu depends on the browser, but when clicked, content entered into control field will always come from the value attribute

This seems... underspecified. Not ideal that Chrome/Safari aren't aligned with Firefox here, and that there is no standard way to only display the label

[from]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

▲ sevenseacat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And styling! The default styling of datalists in most browsers is just ugly.