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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

In the jquery days, I would often do this sort of thing with hidden divs.

i remember doing stuff like that too, but now it's official! ha.

it's exciting to see web standards (finally) taking direction from web developers rather than corporate interests, despite chrome being so prominent. as a random aside, i'm especially hoping forms get more love, like the common behaviors (datetime entry, combobox, validation/feedback, etc.) that every developer has to wrangle with over and over. and it's great to see things like the <modal> element becoming almost fully usable without js (it still needs to be triggered via js, but can be closed with a method='dialog' form button).

Datetime is mostly there. I think firefox and safari have yet to implement <input type=month> and <input type=week>. As for combobox, <datalist id=mylist> and <input list=mylist> is supported everywhere. However I would like to see the CSSWG focus on better standards for styling these, it is possible now using a lot of vendor-specific hacks, but is really annoying.

I’m gonna go ahead though and declare frontend validation (as good as) finished. the constraint validation API is amazing to work with (if you are not afraid of intercepting the submit event using JavaScript).

yah, for datetime, i was mostly thinking about styling the widget via css (and perhaps a bit of configuration via json), with the flexibility that all those datetime components had from the jquery days. month and week are indeed just text fields in firefox (just tested it).

and for validation, i'd like it to be js-less, as it's such an integral part of the form use case. there are recent features that help, like :user-invalid and :focus-within, but it's still far from ideal for default behavior. something as simple as styling labels based on validation state of the input is only possible with the advent of :has(), which is still incomplete/experimental in firefox, but even that's still clunky (there's a combinatorial explosion of possible states to cover, having to consider :disabled, :hover, :required, :focus, etc.).

now? finally?

I've been using <template> for almost a decade.

You weren't doing the same thing, though it may have had the same effect. Template elements aren't part of the "main" DOM.

It had the same effect, yes, which it what I meant. The hidden div was effectively used as a template, by cloning the element and doing some awful manual data binding from JS.

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