Input elements, specifically form input elements, are the basis of data entry and display for HTML based application. The core of the activities of most dynamic web platforms is the population of these elements with data for display, whereas extracting data when the form is submitted. Meanwhile there are a host of other activities, involving the conversion of string entry to data types, validations and formatting.

Despite the commonalities of purpose, the ways that these activities are conducted vary widely amongst the platforms. What dWebSpec defines is a common representation of these activities, for which we provide translations to target platforms in this dictionary.

For this, there are the definitions of standard elements, data types, validators, and format masks, which could be used in the specification.

The element descriptor captures for each element, the specifications in terms of validations, formatting, conversions, presentation behavior, as well as other details. Despite its provision of such high levels of details, it also allows a bird?s eye view of such specifications by providing the information in concise form.

The tables below provide the correspondence between the standard elements types and those supplied with the Struts platform. These are broken into categories: command, input, output, selection, image, message, component.

The element descriptor attributes capture the specifications that are easily translatable to the attributes of Struts component. This is illustrated below. The translation of these attributes could vary for the different element types (input, output, command, and selection). There are more in depth discussions for each of the attributes, which could read by following the links below.

Example of desriptor specification is shown below.

The specifiction would be translated to Struts tag attributes and configuration entries. The table below provides some of these translations. For further details follow the link provided for the descriptor attributes.

A = all, I = input, O = output, C = commands, S = selections except for options, O = selection Option(s)

Other attributes that could be prescribed for an element involve the Passthrough Attributes, these are very important, since these could be entered during the initial page UI design, and must eventually be reflected in the final implementation.