RE: Only Text Input and Intention Events

Great question. I think we should fire a “replace” or “insert” intention (via beforeInput) that has the following default behavior:


1)      If the selection is not collapsed, abort these steps

2)      Insert text (which needs more detail)

This way there is no ambiguity, and authors don’t have to handle inserttext and IMEs. They just have to clear the selection in the intention event handler and then let the browser do the rest.

From: Olivier Forget [mailto:teleclimber@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2014 3:35 PM
To: Ben Peters; public-editing-tf
Subject: Re: Only Text Input and Intention Events

Hi Ben,

Sounds good to me. Question though: in your view of things, what is the default behavior if user inputs text while some content is selected?
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 11:12 AM Ben Peters <Ben.Peters@microsoft.com<mailto:Ben.Peters@microsoft.com>> wrote:
Let’s bring this conversation full circle. I think the first thing we should do is create a new type of contentEditable that only supports inserting characters by default. If a user types using an IME, keyboard, speech, etc, the browser fires beforeInput with the characters to insert and then inserts them by default. For anything else* the browser fires beforeInput with context data and then does nothing by default. The key is that all types of input can be handled in script by responding to Intention Events, with the exception of IME input, which means only character insertion should have a default behavior. If there are low-level apis we need to make this possible, we’ll create them going forward. If this sounds like a reasonable V1, let’s get it spec’d and taken to FPWD.

*Things that have no default behavior in V1: newlines, deletion, formatting, pasting, inserting html, etc.

Ben