mmm-client-ui-widget: design decision for field widgets

[hohwille]

We spent a lot of work for field widgets to allow switching from view to edit mode and vice-versa. Widgets for view and edit mode are designed to be created lazily. However, problems arise e.g. with attaching the focus events as this is currently causing the edit widgets to be created always.
A simpler and maybe more robust alternative might be to have only the raw edit widget (some input) and to switch them between view and edit mode just by setting readonly attribute. Via CSS the appearance for readonly input widgets could be easily tuned to look alike. IE6 and other dinosaurs are not supported anyways.

[hohwille]

As a first step we have improved field widgets such that they can be set to viewOnly mode what causes them to be more lightweight (no container panel, just the view widget itself - what is typically nothing but a Label). This is helpful to improve performance of complex list and grid tables but does not end the discussion opened with this issue.
Both approaches still have its pros and cons. With the current approach we have more flexibility but also more overhead and sometimes more restive/flickering when switching modes. Also we have some security issues to fix as currently password field will display the password in plain-text when switching to view mode what is a bug but can easily be fixed. Further RichTextField is currently showing the HTML source in view mode what is IMHO also undesired.

[hohwille]

A disadvantage of the suggested simplification is that screen readers (currently) do not support readonly. Therefore users of assistive technologies may get confused as they can not notice the difference of a readonly and an editable field. However, this is a bug in screen readers (e.g. JAWS or NVDA) rather than a convincing argument.

[hohwille]

Seems that screen readers do not make much progress:
http://tink.co.uk/2010/02/screen-reader-support-for-disabled-read-only-form-fields/

[hohwille]

Just tested with NVDA 2014.2 and read only is properly detected (tested with FF 30).
I think it is time to go for readonly inputs in view mode and make things a lot more easy.