Rendering option with empty label attribute or whitespace

[josepharhar]

What is the issue with the HTML Standard?

The following HTML has different rendering in chrome, firefox, and safari:

<select multiple>
  <option label="">empty label attribute</option>
  <option label="  ">whitespace label attribute</option>
</select>
<br>
<select>
  <option label="">empty label attribute</option>
  <option label="  ">whitespace label attribute</option>
</select>

Chrome: empty and whitespace label attributes are not used

Firefox: empty label attribute is not used, whitespace label attribute is used

WebKit: empty and whitespace label attributes are used

The spec says this:

An option element is expected to be rendered by displaying the element's label, indented under its optgroup element if it has one.

The label of an option element is the value of the label content attribute, if there is one and its value is not the empty string, or, otherwise, the value of the element's text IDL attribute.

Just based on reading the spec, I think that firefox is the compliant one. But what do yall think the best behavior is?

[annevk]

Not sure, if you really wanted a label to appear empty it's possible in all engines I suspect, it just depends on how persistent you are. (I would imagine whitespace of the non-ASCII variety to work in Chromium, for instance.)

There's probably not a good use case for that though.

So since all engines are different and it doesn't really matter, I guess I would opt for not changing the specification.

[josepharhar]

Thanks! I'll implement the firefox behavior in chromium with no spec changes, since I believe that firefox does what the spec says.

[josepharhar]

I found a chrome internal test which claims that the whitespace behavior is to match IE, so I'll change the behavior in chromium behind a flag and report back if any issues come up.

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:third_party/blink/web_tests/fast/forms/select/HTMLOptionElement_label03.html;l=3;drc=77578ccb4082ae20a9326d9e673225f1189ebb63

[annevk]

Are there web-platform-tests? Typically we leave issues open until at least the standard and tests are in alignment.