status of editing

Hey everyone,
2016 we came quite far in finalizing the beforeinput event, which should
make richtext editing on the web a lot smoother in the near future.
Unfortunately, we are not quite there yet. I would like to get an idea of
how far we are and what needs to happen to have browser ship this.

As far as I can tell, some of the beforeinput events have been implemented
in Webkit [1]. And Chrome has them behind a flag, but it'sapparently not
being shipped because @yosinch and @alexelias possibly think that we could
make beforeinput events during IME concelable anyway and they would
possibly want to waitwith shipping this until we have added this to this
version of the spec [1]. Correct?

There are also new and unresolved issues, mainly on Safari and macOS:

* It is still unclear how we can get the longpress-key-to-IME on macOS to
work well with the beforeinput event. [2]

* The undo stack is global, which means it's broken for every editor we
have been able to find on the net, including those managed by all the
browser maker companies. It would be good if we could figure out how to
replace the global undo stack for contenteditable with separate undo stacks
for every contenteditable element (could be an optional setting if this
works best for Safari, even though no existing editor uses the global
setting) [3].

* There is a large, opverlapping menu on iOS giving formatting options.
This is problematic for two reasons: 1. It overlaps the texteditor 2. It
may offer formatting solutions that are not available in the editor the
user is looking at. A solution was presented to be able to turn features
off [4]. This will fix 2, but it will not work for 1, because the menu will
continue to contain items related to the clipboard. This may however be OK,
as newer versions of Android also seem to have this overlapping menu for
clipboard-related actions, and as far as the editor developers I have
spoken to, there seem not to have been massive amounts of user complaints
about the Android menu to them.

* The issue with the non-available features in editors has apparently
become worse with the "Touch Bar" on Macbook Pro. While Safari always had
some editing options hidden in an obscure menu that don't seem to work in
any of the existign editors, some of these formatting options are now more
prominently placed, which means it will be more obvious when they don't
work [5].


These are some of the main items I think we need to work with next. There
are many more github issues. In the past I tried to close github issues and
create new ones once the discussion in them turned them into something
entirely different, but some of you disagree with that, so now we have a
lot of open github issues, not all of which we will resolve this year.


What do you guys think? Will we be able to move ahead with some of this?

[1] https://github.com/w3c/input-events/issues/45
[2] https://github.com/w3c/editing/issues/132
[3] https://github.com/w3c/editing/issues/150
[4] https://github.com/w3c/input-events/issues/32
[5] https://twitter.com/gigasoft/status/815256495046660097



-- 
Johannes Wilm
Fidus Writer
http://www.fiduswriter.org