Re: html5 editor responds to Canvas accessibility related bugs

  On 10/3/2010 5:57 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Oct 2010, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>> Many people have used<div contentEditable>  with editors [...] and have
>> expressed interest in alternatives.
> The appropriate response to people raising issues with contentEditable is
> not to make an even worse solution accessible, it's to fix the problems
> with contentEditable.

Web apps and hypertext browsers are two distinct platforms.

They are different solutions to different problems. <div 
contentEditable> is about editing HTML. It is a subset of text editing.

The vast majority of text input is handled by HTML Forms: that's a good 
thing. But I can't even implement Notepad in <textarea>.

I'm not asking you to change specs here; just giving you a lesson in the 
Web Apps perspective you seem to have lost.

Most agents are coded in C++, using various 2d surface APIs. That's fine 
with me, provided those 2d surface APIs are exposed to the scripting 
environment via Canvas.

textarea+canvas handles pen input gracefully.
textarea+canvas can be used outside of a web browser environment. Much 
as SVG can be used by viewers.
textarea+canvas can stay stable across operating system environments. It 
doesn't leave the UI up to the OS.
If I wanted the OS/browser to handle it, I'd use <textarea> alone. And I 
do, in many cases.

Web Apps can be very distant from hypertext. If you want to shoe-horn 
every instance of text editing into contentEditable, that's really your 
call. I don't want to be held-up while you work through that experiment. 
While you're working through it, I will continue to adopt its APIs, in 
my own programming.

This is an issue about application design, not web pages. Canvas is the 
unified 2d surface api supported by the w3c. It's used in application 
development, it's not that critical to authoring web pages. You're 
saying that Mozilla implementing <textarea> in C++ w/ Cairo is fine, but 
implementing it in JS w/ Canvas is not. I don't buy it.

Until you can see WebApps as something distinct from your work with a 
handful of browser vendors, you're going to be stuck and stubborn. I get 
that. We'll sort out the lumpy bits in the specs as time goes on.

-Charles

Received on Monday, 4 October 2010 01:45:21 UTC