On Feb 19, 2007, at 9:49 PM, Rob Burns wrote:
On Feb 19, 2007, at 11:30 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Feb 19, 2007, at 9:04 PM, Dan Wood wrote:
Running blot, it appears that editable divs in webkit treat
option-space as a regular space, not as a non-breaking space. I
can't believe this could have been neglected, so maybe it's not a
bug?
Personally, I'd like to be able to insert non-breaking spaces,
since it would mirror other text fields.
Any thoughts? Should I file a bug?
I think the reason this is done is because we use a sequence of
alternating normal spaces and non-breaking spaces, plus some
special WebKit-specific CSS properties, to achieve desired
whitespace behavior. We want multiple spaces to show up in the
middle of a line, but collapse away at the end, as in normal text
editors.
In WebKit-based clients, like Safari or Mail, we can get the
display to be just right, using a special CSS property. In other
clients, we want decent fallback. The closest you can get is
alternating space / nbsp, which preserves the multiple spaces but
will break in the middle if needed.
An alternate design for this that still allowed entering true non-
breaking spaces would be welcome - we could not figure out how
last time we thought about this.
Perhaps I'm not understanding this correctly, but the alternating
of non-breaking spaces with spaces should not prevent the
deliberate insertion of a non-breaking space. If a user is actually
hodling down the option key while typing space, the editor should
insert a non-breaking space. While this could create rendering
problems, that would just be the result of a user intentionally
putting in too many non-breaking space. The user would be aware of
what caused the problem. It's often necessary to deliberate use non-
breaking spaces. The Cocoa text system allows this. For example, if
I'm trying to prevent a runt at the end of paragraph I might want
to type <option>-<space> before the final word of a paragraph.
The alternating space non-break-space prevents the usual HTML/XML
treatment of whitespace by collapsing multiple consecutive spaces
into one space. Again, nothing should prevent WebKit from allowing
users to intentionally insert a non-break-space.
The problems are:
1) WebKit's special property for these space / nbsp sequences makes
it treat both the same, so the literal non-breaking space would still
be treated by layout the space as a normal space.
2) WebKit reformats whitespace as you edit (deleting or inserting
spaces) to preserve alternating space/nbsp sequences, this would
smash any directly user-entered non-breaking spaces.
3) If you are in the middle of one of these space/nbsp sequences,
inserted a non-breaking space directly will not do what you expect.
you will be making a bigger cluster of non-breaking spaces than you
think.
I'm sure it's possible to make it all work as desired but I suspect
it would be pretty complicated.
Regards,
Maciej
_______________________________________________
webkit-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
