Html: Virtual keyboard suggestions based on pattern attribute value

[annevk]

Some user agents show a different keyboard for, e.g., pattern=[0-9]+. I think we should at least make mention of that possibility, though potentially also discourage developers from relying on it and recommending inputmode instead.

Previously came up in #1626.

[pygy]

The W3C just deprecated inputmode in their "HTML 5.2" spec. Should we just ignore them?

https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#features-removed

Edit, also, re. what should be recommended, someone promptly marked it as obsolete on MDN. Should it be reverted?

Digging deeper, it looks like it is still WIP as far as implementations go (at least inputmode=numeric doesn't have any effect)...

Edit some more, for myself, in light of the response below, without causing more notification noise... These pages will need to be updated as well once the implementation lands:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Editable_content
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes

[annevk]

We just updated inputmode (different values, now applies to all elements) as Chrome is planning on implementing it soonish and at least Firefox will too at some point: https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/d430f275f4e253956a5965c8b90885d3ac4e90c1.

In light of that the MDN change seems somewhat reasonable, though it might be better for MDN to just state the attribute isn't implemented yet (and update the values to match what's in the HTML Standard now).

[michealfriesen]

Does anyone know why it is being deprecated? It seems like an awesome user experience improvement.

[domenic]

Generally this is not the best place to ask; nobody here knows why the W3C fork does anything. Fortunately you can ignore it; it's not followed by any browsers.

[annevk]

To be clear, the W3C stating something in HTML is deprecated is not generally accepted by the HTML community at large unless the WHATWG also considers it deprecated. In particular, all browsers participate in the WHATWG and as far as we know want inputmode to succeed.