Question

I am using decorators for my forms in a Zend Framework (version 1.10.6) application and they output elements with attribute helper that W3C finds invalid against HTML5 Doctype.

<input type="hidden" name="control" value="search" helper="formHidden" id="control">

W3C Validator is giving me this error:
Attribute helper not allowed on element input at this point.

Answer 1

Nothing I found about this issue is working so after many hours of trying different approaches I found it easier to change the core (yes, I know it’s not recommended but it is still a solution).

Here is the answer (for input hidden):

• go to Zend/View/Helper/FormHidden.php

• at the end of the file you will find this line of code

  return $this->_hidden($name, $value, $attribs);
  

• add this code BEFORE it

  unset($attribs['helper']);
  

What it does is remove the helper attribute from the array of attributes applied to the input hidden element.

The same applies for all form elements.

Example for input text:

• go to Zend/View/Helper/FormText.php

• at the end of the file you will find these lines of code

  $xhtml = '<input type="text"'
         . ' name="' . $this->view->escape($name) . '"'
         . ' id="' . $this->view->escape($id) . '"'
         . ' value="' . $this->view->escape($value) . '"'
         . $disabled
         . $this->_htmlAttribs($attribs)
         . $endTag;
  
  return $xhtml;
  

• add this code BEFORE it

  unset($attribs['helper']);
  

Doing this for all form elements my website passed W3C HTML5 validation, so I am satisfied with this solution and hope it gets resolved with Zend Framework 2.0