EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
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Status: Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: Concurred with reporter's comments.

Checked in as WHATWG revision r4782.
Check-in comment: List some more obsolete attributes (these, from the 'reserved' notes in the HTML4 DTD -- yes, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel now)
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=4781&to=4782

after noticing wakaba's http://suika.fam.cx/~wakaba/wiki/sw/n/dataformatas and checking the HTML 4.01 DTD, I see that the HTML4 DTD did not allow the %reserved; parameter entity globally but instead referenced it only in the attlist definitions for just eight elements: span, div, object, input, select, textarea, button, and table

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/dtd.html

So I propose that the wording for the bit about datasrc, datafld, and dataformatas in the "Non-conforming features" section of the spec be changed to replace "on any element" with explicit mention of the span, div, object, input, select, textarea, button, and table elements instead.

If you actually look closely at the DTD you'll see that HTML4 doesn't actually allow it on any HTML element. The %reserved entity is set to the empty string. That's why I didn't list any elements, because technically they were never allowed anywhere.

(In reply to comment #4)
> If you actually look closely at the DTD you'll see that HTML4 doesn't actually
> allow it on any HTML element. The %reserved entity is set to the empty string.
> That's why I didn't list any elements, because technically they were never
> allowed anywhere.

I recognize they were never allowed. That's why I wrote "referenced". And the fact is that it's referenced only in the attlist definitions for just eight elements: span, div, object, input, select, textarea, button, and table. Those represent the elements for which is was explicitly "reserved" as intended to be valid on for future use.

To put it another way, these attributes were never specified as being potential global attributes.

Stepping back, the reason that I would really prefer that the spec explicitly list which elements these attributes were meant to be allowed on is that otherwise, conformance checkers that want to provide guidance to end users about them will need to handle error reporting for them as if they were intended to be allowed globally, which adds a significant amount of unnecessary complexity to checkers.

(For which elements does IE support these attributes?)

(In reply to comment #6)
> (For which elements does IE support these attributes?)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533706(VS.85).aspx
seems to indicate that is supports dataformatas on BUTTON, DIV, INPUT type=button, LABEL, LEGEND, MARQUEE, OBJECT, OPTION, SELECT, SPAN, TABLE

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533703(VS.85).aspx
datafld, A, APPLET, BUTTON, DIV, FIELDSET, FRAME, IFRAME, IMG, INPUT type=button, INPUT type=checkbox, INPUT type=hidden, INPUT type=image, INPUT type=password, INPUT type=radio, INPUT type=text, LABEL, LEGEND, MARQUEE, OBJECT, PARAM, SELECT, SPAN, TEXTAREA

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533709(VS.85).aspx
datasrc, A, APPLET, BUTTON, DIV, FRAME, IFRAME, IMG, INPUT type=button, INPUT type=checkbox, INPUT type=hidden, INPUT type=image, INPUT type=password, INPUT type=radio, INPUT type=text, LABEL, LEGEND, MARQUEE, OBJECT, OPTION, SELECT, SPAN, TABLE, TEXTAREA

Considering that HTML4 technically didn't allow these for any elements, and the spec lists <multicol> which HTML4 also didn't allow, maybe these attributes should be considered IE extensions instead of HTML4 reserved attributes, and thus the spec should list it for the elements IE support them.

Mike:
(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > If you actually look closely at the DTD you'll see that HTML4 doesn't actually
> > allow it on any HTML element. The %reserved entity is set to the empty string.
> 
> I recognize they were never allowed. That's why I wrote "referenced".

They're technically not even referenced. What's referenced is an empty string.

EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: Concurred with reporter's comments, though I doubt anyone will ever care...

Checked in as WHATWG revision r4877.
Check-in comment: be more specific about some obsolete IE elements
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=4876&to=4877