Re: Way forward and IME behavior speccing

I'm feeling that I'm not communicating well on what I wanted to say, sorry
about that. Let me try to re-phrase.

In my understanding, we started this work with the ultimate goal of:

1. Provide better editing experience to web developers and users.

To achieve the goal, we figured out that unspec'ed, non-interoperable DOM
operations occur in browsers today, and a lot of editor developer's time
and efforts are spent to fight with it. So this group set the secondary
goal as:

2. Avoid unspec'ed, non-interoperable DOM operations in browsers during the
editing operations.

With that achieved, editor developers can use their time and efforts to
make better editors, so we consider this can help the goal 1.

At some point, we started discussing slightly modified goal as:

3. Avoid browsers messing with DOM **at all**.

This goal is different from the goal 2 in that, the goal 2 selectively
allows DOM operations if it doesn't bother editor developers, or things
work interoperably, while the goal 3 prohibits every single operation.

And this proposal, IIUC, is:

4. Forbid IMEs do too much work to achieve the goal 3.

I see the current discussions are about how important 4 is to make 3 to
happen. I think I understand that.

What I don't clearly understand are:

A. Is the goal 3 really required to make goal 2?
B. When the goal 4 was achieved, can we really achieve the goal 1?

Ben rejected the idea of atomic IME commits and making all compositions
invisible to JS because, while he acknowledged that it helps editor
developers, he thought it contradicts with the goal 1. Unfortunately we
don't have reps from MS at this moment, but if we consider his opinion is
still valid, MS is against the goal 3 and 4.

Also, IME is doing all the work for some good sake. I understand forbidding
some behaviors gives better control for editors, but if our conclusion is
to get something by disabling some IME features, we need to carefully
review whether it really provides better experience or not in total. It'd
be time consuming and a hard way, and we know MS will not agree, so we miss
goal 2 anyway.

So I'm asking, let's try to forget goal 2, 3, and 4 once, and ask ourselves
that, is what you're proposing the only way to achieve the goal 1? Isn't
there any other ways by modifying goal 2, 3, or 4 and still achieve the
goal 1?

/koji