Item1386: adding a textarea HTML tag into a formfield value will ruin rendering textarea

I presume we should make an effort to stop rendering becoming messed up

-- SvenDowideit - 29 Mar 2009

Looks OK to me - unless you mean an unclosed textarea tag - in which case, why?

Foswiki is a nest of tradeoffs. We allow some things that can mess up rendering, because it gives us extra power in other ways.

I don't think any action is required.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Jun 2010

sadly, I don't agree - there are compromises that cause our users trouble, and so are plausibly not something we need to gloss over as we have done - so I'll just set it to me and you can ignore it that way :/

-- SvenDowideit - 24 Jun 2010

I am very interested in how you are planning to fix this, because I am depending on formfields storing HTML to continue working, ie. richtext formfield type.

To be honest, the functionality you seek could fall out of a reworking of the Foswiki::Forms API, maybe a plugin could clean up or strip malformed HTML on save, etc..

-- PaulHarvey - 24 Jun 2010

Another option, which I've mentioned elsewhere, is perhaps add the ability to control the renderForDisplay a bit better. Sometimes you want $formfield() to render exactly, without newlines being mangled as <br/>, sometimes you want all interesting characters to be encoded as HTML entities, etc.

The question is: Do we do this when defining the formfield (I think yes), or allow $formfield() to take some parameters to control rendering (would be powerful, but we hate extending syntax, and probably dangerous/unforseen problems)

-- PaulHarvey - 24 Jun 2010

I do not see a straight forward bug where we know exactly how things should behave.

You want to start encoding all > or < tags? That means no more html in formfields. That is not a good idea.

You want to treat <textarea a special way? Then how many more special cases do we need to address?

How is this different from being able to put tags in the topic which also goof up the whole page?

I think this is feature proposal material and not a bug report that can be acted on. It will be one of these Waiting For reports that get more than a year old.

I am no actioning this and it should stay so unless there is a specific bug fix with spec that can be proposed to close it.

-- KennethLavrsen - 31 Jul 2010