Re: Way forward and IME behavior speccing

> 
> On 12 Oct 2015, at 09:52, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@apple.com> wrote:
>> While IMEs mostly just manipulate the contents of text nodes, the future of IMEs is apparently a lot more complex. As I believe you mentioned yourself, Koji, IMEs on Android edit entire words, even if the word has more complex DOM structures inside of it.
>> 
>> 
>> For example, say I have a language in which "2nd" is written as "2<sup>a</sup>". So the user types "2" and "a", and the IME then automatically inserts:
>> 
>> 2<sup>a</sup> 
>> 
>> or because it is another browser it may decide to add this type of HTML within the IME:
>> 
>> 2<span style="font-size: 11px;font-face: Arial;vertical-align:sup;" class="--Webkit-custom-property">a</span>
>> 
>> or some such thing. Because it's IME, one won't be able to cancel it or change it, at least not before the entire composition is done.
>> 
>> So, to stop all of this, we need a clear specification of IMEs. And it needs to be restrictive. There are a million things IMEs might do, but if every IME does it's own thing, it's bound to just break most of the internet and not to be of benefit to anyone.
> 
> The problem is that we can't. IME is a system component. Browsers can't modify how IME works on each system.

To the extend that the IME is inserting HTML markup and/or manipulating the DOM beyond inserting/changing plain text, it is not just being a standard system component. If it is doing that, it is aware that it is working in a browser, and doing something special. If that's the case, then it can certainly obey the rules of what should happen in a browser.

Received on Monday, 12 October 2015 09:46:06 UTC