On 15/03/2014 18:44 , Johannes Wilm wrote:
yes btw -- where should one go to lobby in favor of the editing spec? I have been communicating with several other browser-based editor projects, and there seems to be a general interest of more communication with the browser creators and spec writers. Currently the situation is that it's so broken in all the browsers, that one needs to use a 100% javascript approach, painting the caret manually and creating a separate system for selections, to circumvent the main problems of contenteditable (for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873883 ). Codemirror is a good example of that.
My understanding from talking to various people is that at least part of the problem comes from the type of code that is currently deployed in the wild. An awful lot of it works around browser inconsistencies not through feature testing but through user agent switching. This means that when a given browser fixes a bug in order to become more in line with others (and presumably the spec), it actually breaks deployed code (some of which is deployed an awful lot).
I've been talking with some editor developers and have heard some interesting ideas, notably from the Substance.io people.
One suggestion has been to make at least the selection API interoperable, which seems achievable. So I'm very glad to see Ryosuke propose it here, I was about to suggest the same.
Another that I've been mulling over is to have something like contenteditable=minimal (bikeshed syntax at will). This would give you a caret with attendant keyboard motion and selection, but no ability to actually edit the content. Editing would happen by having a script listen to key events and act directly on the content itself. The hope is that not only is this a saner architecture for an editor, but it can also bypass most (possibly all, if the selection API is improved somewhat) browser bugs to do with editing.
I reckon a spec for that could be put together relatively easily. I'm still digging through Web editors' code to get a feel for how much it would actually help.
-- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
