from Hacker News

Bug 344618 - Implement input type="range"

by jmitcheson on 9/6/12, 11:36 AM with 25 comments

• by gioele on 9/6/12, 3:02 PM

  Misleading title. Flamebait.

  Mozilla devs have limited resources and they decided to tackle developing a better DOM before adding new auxiliary features. How is this wrong?

  The main comment says:

  «On the DOM side, there is a major refactoring of the DOM based on WebIDL (bug 580070) going on. This will yield better conformance and I'm confident DOM performance, likely security too I would guess.

  Meanwhile, I agree, no new feature (like this bug) is being worked on. That's unfortunate, but it's a matter of priority.»

  They think that their efforts are better spent on DOM performance rather than form sliders. We argue about that, but one has to accept that, in presence of limited resources, one has to prioritise something.

• by Osmose on 9/6/12, 12:55 PM

  In case anyone decides that they want to register for Bugzilla and comment on the bug itself about how they feel about priorities, please heed bz's comment and take the discussion to a more appropriate (and probably more responsive) area, like dev-planning[1] or dev-platform[2].

  Bugs like this are meant to be mostly for technical discussion and aren't the most effective way of getting attention around this kind've issue.

  [1] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-planning

  [2] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

• by overgard on 9/6/12, 1:15 PM

  Thinking about it, I don't think I've ever really had a reason to use a slider on a web form. It'd be nice to have, I suppose.

  To me implying that "HTML5 isn't a priority for mozilla" because they haven't implemented a really marginal component is quite an exaggeration. I think using bug reports to try to create pressure on developers is in this weird grey area of stuff where it violates some sort of implicit social code of bug reporting. (In short: it's sort of a passive aggressive move)

  Having an opinion on what should prioritized is fine, but it should be marketed as such, IE, make it a blog post or write an email or something instead.

• by shardling on 9/6/12, 1:37 PM

  The title here really needs to be changed. No one in the linked report representing Mozilla says anything even close to that. The phrase "not a priority" doesn't even appear on that page, so putting it in quotes is a bit much!

• by MatthewPhillips on 9/6/12, 11:57 AM

  Is this bad? All browsers must have priorities. Is there a reason why input[type="range"] should be a priority over the stuff they're working on?

• by randomfool on 9/6/12, 12:44 PM

  It's a bummer since sliders are such a fundamental control.

  When people must create their own:

  * Implementations are more often than not sub-par.

  * Implementations are inconsistent (will clicking off the thumb snap to the mouse or act as an increment?).

  * There is no platform-native look & feel control (which should matter for any FF phone device, as they should want all apps to use a single slider implementation).

• by eckyptang on 9/6/12, 1:24 PM

  I've noticed this as well without having to go near their bugzilla for confirmation. It's not just the range control - it's pretty much everything.

  This is one of the features that would stop me having to churn out literally acres of JavaScript validation and normalising forms across different browsers.

  I mean even IE10 supports them now: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/Forms/default.html

• by Achshar on 9/6/12, 1:10 PM

  While i agree that it probably doesn't matter what gets priority from dev prespective, i believe they should implement form stuff first because they are (probably) easier to implement than a whole API that interacts pages with OS. The devs who try out the simple to test input type range code are far more in number than people who try out APIs. So they take less time and have more users than apis.j cant see why they aren't higher in priority especially since all other major browsers have atleast some kind of implimentation of it.

• by earnubs on 9/6/12, 2:45 PM

  Range inputs are one of those things that seem obvious but in practice aren't that useful, in the grand scheme of things.