Way forward and IME behavior speccing

Hey,
as you all will know, we had quite a productive F2F meeting in Paris in
connection with the CSSWG at the end of August.

Unfortunately a few more issues appeared just after the meeting had
concluded, principally issues the browser makers found after concluding the
meeting that had not come up during the meeting itself. We hope to be able
to clarify all these points during the Wednesday of TPAC [1].

The issues are:

-- The name of the events (beforeInput/Input or beforeEdit/Edit). [2]
-- What is the complete list of edit operations for beforeEdit/beforeInput?
[3]
-- Complications related to IME input. [4]

Particularly IME input seems to be an evergrowing problem. We already had
to move from cE=events to cE=typing, which is a odd mode in that it only
allows character input, and deletion, but deletion only during IME
composition. But now it seems that even that is not enough, that IME input
need to be able to arbitrarily change the DOM and that IME composition
cannot in any way be restricted. Also, IME is working differently on every
platform and with every IME engine and a lot of IME interfaces are
apparently constantly on the brink of breaking.

To me this all sounds as if IME is like Flash, just that there are 30
different versions of it now and need to accommodate those + 150 future
versions whose functionality is not yet known . Ie - it's not a situation
that is viable in the long term. And because the usage of IMEs is expanding
(on Android everything is IME), the only way to kill the monster is to
start speccing the behavior of IMEs and to make sure they  all are
restricted in their behavior and that their behavior is standardized.

The IME API [5] does not seem to talk about any of that. The question is:
Is this a document that still needs to be made, or is it already happening
somewhere else?


Btw, to me it seemed that one of the more important points is to sandbox
the IME [4], but as I understand Piotr (CK Editor), that is not necessarily
enough -- being able to cancel or modify individual composition operations
(including deletions) would be more important.



[1]
https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2015/SessionIdeas#Text_editing_in_the_browser
[2] https://github.com/w3c/editing/issues/87
[3] https://github.com/w3c/editing/issues/79
[4] See for example
https://github.com/w3c/uievents/issues/5#issuecomment-137559461
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/ime-api/
-- 
Johannes Wilm
Fidus Writer
http://www.fiduswriter.org