Should we take CSS into consideration? (was: Re: attribute or CSS property?)

Hey,
so there seems to be a majority for going with an attribute rather a CSS
property when it comes to assigning editability.

Another somewhat question seems to have come up a few times over the last
few days without being discussed directly is how CSS should or shouldn't
influence contenteditable=typing.

*AGAINST:* Piotr mentioned some reasons not to take CSS into consideration:
"We are often traversing DOM to check whether some element is inside
editable container or not and we do that also on detached DOM (when
processing input/output data). If we would need to check computed styles I
think it would be both - slower and/or more limited/complicated. [...]
Visibility
does not affect editability -
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25908". The mentioned link
mentions a case where a contenteditable element was inside of a dom element
that was hidden with display:none and was making the point that the
contenteditable element should still work as normal.

*FOR:* Olivier mentioned a display:none node inside of a
contenteditable=typing, which he believes should be treated as if it didn't
exist ( https://github.com/w3c/selection-api/issues/27#issuecomment-65961041
) and Federico thinks that carets should behave different for some types of
display:inline-block elements ("I understand that there may be situations
where you want to style non editable blocks in a more evident way to the
user, with borders, padding, etc... so it sounds reasonable for me that if
the outer <span cE=false> has the "display" style set to anything that is
not "inline", like "inline-block", the movement would count as a in-between
blocks move, so the caret will be before "b". This would be a good way to
bring developers control over this behavior.")

I can see good arguments for both positions, but I think we should try to
be consistent in some way. Think of this example:

<div style="display:none;">
  <div contenteditable=true>
    Hello <span style="display:none">Austria</span>!
  </div>
</div>


We could of course combine the two proposals above, but it would then seem
to mean that we start to operate with several layers of
display-none-ishness, which I'm not sure was intended.

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