1141038 - input type=text list= should behave as a select

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Form Manager, defect)

Description

[Ben]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Build ID: 20150305221847

Steps to reproduce:

I created a short HTML file with:

<input name=country type=list list=country_list>
<datalist id=country_list>
<option value=de label="Germany">Germany</option>
<option value=es label="Spain">Spain</option>
<option value=gb label="United Kingdom">United Kingdom</option>
</datalist>


Actual results:

Firefox correctly searches the text that I type in the labels, for example: typeing "un" shows "United Kingdom", but when selecting the option, it displays the value "gb" in the input field.


Expected results:

Firefox should behave as with a select, displaying the text that was selected ("United Kingdom") in the input field and keeping the value "gb" under the hood, hidden from the user, because it is not what the user searched for or selected.

Comment 1

[Ben]

Furthermore, W3.org shows an example for legacy browsers to fall back to a select, so that indicates that both should work similarly:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/forms.html#attr-input-list

Comment 2

[Sergey Galich [:serg]]

Input type=list does not exists.

Autocompleting label instead of value will lead to more confusion.

Comment 3

[Ben]

(In reply to Sergey Galich [:serg] from comment #2)

Input type=list does not exists.
You're right. That should not be there.

Autocompleting label instead of value will lead to more confusion.
I disagree. Firefox shows the label and searches the labels. Displaying gb is actually what leads to confusion.

Please reconsider, because with the proposed change, the list attribute becomes much more useful.