275256 - Change Tag loses HTML attributes

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, enhancement)

Description

[Joachim Noreiko]

Using the Change Tag function (on the status bar -- see bug 256570, bug 275186)
causes Composer to lose all the HTML attributes for that tag.

As a number of attributes apply to all tags (CLASS, ID, etc) these should remain
with the new tag. (And in fact, since Composer doesn't appear to check whether
attributes are relevant to the tag, ALL attributes should remain.)

Comment 1

[Gérard Talbot]

> As a number of attributes apply to all tags (CLASS, ID, etc) these should 
> remain with the new tag. (And in fact, since Composer doesn't appear to check
> whether attributes are relevant to the tag, ALL attributes should remain.)

This one will be up to module owner. The obvious problem is that not all
attributes from the source tag can always be "transferred" to the target tag.
Some are common (id, class, title, lang, dir) but they are not universal (BASE,
BASEFONT, HEAD, HTML, META, PARAM, SCRIPT, TITLE don't accept such attributes);
so Composer would have to check the soundness of keeping and transferring these
5 common attributes from its tag predecessor. On the other hand, base, basefont,
head, html, meta, param, script, title do not, can not appear in that statusbar...

The safe, problem-free and easy (from a coding wise perspective) solution is to
not transfer (and to remove) the attribute declarations to the new tag. The
user, if he just decided to change a tag, should know (or expect) that he may
have to re-edit the attribute declarations.

Personally, I would recommend WONTFIX.

Comment 2

[Joachim Noreiko]

As far as I can tell, there is no current checking of HTML syntax: the change
tag system just let me change a P tag to a TITLE tag, and the advanced
properties dialog lets me add any meaningless attributes.

Some sort of DTD checking will presumably be implemented in future -- in the
meantime, you're already letting the user make mistakes in other areas, please
add this one! :)

Comment 3

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

I am WONTFIX'ing this bug. I certainly don't want to see authors who are not
familiar with the HTML dtd being allowed to turn <a href="foo.html"> into <span
href="foo.html"> in a standard-compliant editor. No way.
Make an XPI to handle that if you really need it but don't do that in the core.

Comment 4

[Joachim Noreiko]

Is there a plan to eventually have Composer able to check the HTML DTD for
validity of attributes? This enhancement could be implemented properly then.