[Bug 13057] Remove INS and DEL elements in favor of a new set of attributes

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13057

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #9 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 2011-12-02 17:02:19 UTC ---
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Agreed with earlier comments that there isn't a strong rationale for
a new feature here. I don't see much value in dropping <ins> and <del> though.
Like with <samp> and other rarely used elements that we've kept around, they
are relatively harmless.

Also, I don't buy that they're impossible to use. They're quite easy to use,
actually.


"ins and del are, by definition, both inline-level and block-level elements."

We don't have those terms anymore. They are simply "transparent", like <a>.


"If in a Wysiwyg editor, you select the textual contents of a paragraph, turn
on a "Visible Modification Marks" feature and hit the Delete or Backspace key,
the editor has the option between <del><p>....</p></del> and
<p><del>...</del></p>."

That would be true of any edit description mechanism.


"The user has no way to make a difference between the two but the two are NOT
strictly equivalent. In the latter case, it is still theoretically possible to
place the caret in the paragraph but BEFORE or AFTER the del element and insert
new chars. In the former case, the whole paragraph is deleted and the user
can't insert anything inside any more."

This is not a particularly problematic difference. So what if some editors let
you add text in a paragraph whose contents are all deleted and another editor
only allows you to add a sibling paragraph?


"In the latter case just above, it's impossible for the user to know if a caret
placed at the beginning of the paragraph is before the paragraph, inside the
paragraph but before the del element, or at the beginning of the del element."

That's a generic problem with nested elements like multiple nested <span>s, and
has nothing to do with <ins>/<del>. Word Perfect solved that problem in the
early 90s with "view codes" mode.


"much more importantly, ins and del cannot cover one trivial case : since there
is no equivalent to SGML inclusions in XML, the following is impossible:
<ul><del><li>a</li></del><li>b</li></ul>."

The spec covers how to mark up deleted list items.


"It is for instance totally impossible to mark an element as entirely deleted
if the parent container's model does not allow the del element..."

This does not appear to be a practical problem. You can just mark the child's
contents as being deleted.

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Received on Friday, 2 December 2011 17:02:26 UTC