On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 8:54 PM, Shezan Baig <shezbaig...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We are in the process of porting our native Windows application from > using a proprietary rendering framework to using WebKit as our > rendering framework. Our application is not Chrome, neither is it > Safari, Firefox, or Opera. In fact, it isn't a web browser at all. > > Throughout this effort, we've come across many instances where we have > had to modify WebKit in order to make our application work the way our > users expect it to. All these changes are maintained in our own > private fork, which we frequently merge with upstream. > > Yes, our users *do* expect overtype mode to work, and yes, we do want > a blinking block cursor, however I consider that as an orthogonal > setting and not necessarily tied to overtype mode. The way I > envisioned this would be that the embedding application would set a > property on the contenteditable div to turn on/off the overtype mode, > based on some UI interaction (whether it is via the Insert key, or > some menu command is up to the application). When the contenteditable > is in overtype mode, this essentially makes TypingCommand replace the > next character instead of inserting characters. This is a behavior > change *only*, not a visual change. > > When the application switches the overtype mode on/off, it would also > at the same time modify the appearance of the cursor (in our app, this > will be done via non-standard css properties, like "caret-width" and > "caret-color", and yes, we only plan use this for fixed-width fonts). > Have you tested your code with bidirectional text? I don't think using block caret will work due to the way offsets at bidi-level boundary works in WebKit. In particular, suppose we have, in the document/byte order, ABC123 where ABC are strongly RTL letters in a LTR block. Then this text is rendered as: 123CBA If we were to place logical/DOM offset at where they appear visually, we have: (0)1(1)2(2)3C(5)B(4)A(3)(6) i.e. At offset 3, the caret will visually appear on the right of "A". If you were just setting the caret width, the caret will look as if we're inserting a character on the right of "A", which is extremely misleading to a user. It might also change the border color of the contenteditable. My > point is that the visual appearance to indicate that we are in > overtype mode is not something I would expect WebKit to control. So > I'd rather leave discussion of the appearance separate from the > functionality/behavior itself. > I agree with that statement but letting applications mess with the shape/color of caret is a dangerous game to play since a lot of application developers don't know how CJK and RTL text work in WebKit. So I guess the question boils down to something like: if we have > changes that are generally useful, but not used in the major WebKit > applications (i.e. Chrome, Safari, Opera), does it make sense to > upstream it to WebKit for the benefit of the general community? > Yes. It makes a lot of sense for this feature to be in WebKit. We can probably expose some member functions on Editor or add new execCommand only executable via menu/keyboard binding to toggle this feature. I don't think it makes a sense for WebCore to detect Insert Key and automatically move into the inse - R. Niwa
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