On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 9:05 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rn...@apple.com> wrote: > Thanks for the pointer. > > Unfortunately, we might need to take a slightly different approach more based > on the CSS box tree because whitespace collapsing, etc... are defined in > CSS2.1 and CSS level 3 specifications.
As far as I know, CSS does not define the box tree with nearly enough precision to allow basing a precise innerText spec on it. From black-box testing at the time I wrote the spec, it seemed to me that WebKit's implementation was built on some sort of internal CSS representation that does not match anything that currently exists in spec-land. So I'm skeptical of the feasibility of this approach until someone rewrites CSS in a more precise fashion. I also don't know if all implementations could support such an approach at all -- IIRC, I was told that for Gecko to even support display:none in Selection.toString was difficult. But I'm not a CSS expert by any means, so I could well be entirely wrong. The approach I took in my abortive spec attempt is certainly not good at all (which is part of why it was abortive).