Re: High-level goals and objectives of the Editing TF (was Way forward and IME behavior speccing

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 2:34 AM, Johannes Wilm <johanneswilm@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey,
> I agree with Florian here. This has nothing to do with disabling through
> preventDefault. PreventDefault is used within the space of web based editors
> mainly to provide JS editor defined behavior to replace undesired default
> browser behavior.
>
> If one wants to just forbid IME from accessing a site, one would probably do
> some sniffing to see if the user is on a mobile device and additionally
> redirect the user to a different address when receiving the first
> compositionstart event.
>
> Or to achieve the other behavior where IME just doesn't produce any input,
> just cancel the compositionstart, not every single IME-based beforeEdit
> event.
>
> Sorry if that was misunderstood.

Thanks for the clarifications, it's good to know. Unfortunately, it
still doesn't change the situation.

Even if it's designed for good things, preventDefault IME events can
lead to hinder user experiences severely. Oftentimes affected users
are minority, and apps do it ignoring minority, which hinders platform
healthiness.

Even technically, some platforms, such as Linux, does not provide such
API. Some platforms require the cancellation made synchronously to OS
events, which is really hard to implement in browsers. Windows does,
but the use of the API will produce a lot of bugs and troubles. A
product I used to work on tried it and gave up. Once 5 years or a
decade, I saw someone making such proposals and saw the same number of
failures.

As I wrote before, IME is like Caps Lock. Your Mac might have an LED
to indicate the Caps Lock state, so every time and then someone asks
if programs can turn it off. Windows actually added such API (and
still exists if they didn't remove.)

However, the answer is no, there are some keyboards that toggles by
hardware. Also users consider s/he owns the Caps Lock, so if program
turns it off, user often hit it, assuming s/he turn it off, but
actually turn it back on. It's too much frustrations that you wouldn't
see any apps doing it today. Some apps such as password entry form may
say "hey, you have Caps Lock on, are you sure?"

That's the way I'd like to take for IME. It can give you all the
status it will need, but programs need to deal with it.

Keyboard, including hardware, software, and IME, are all what user
controls, not editors, browsers, nor even OSs. Programs should respond
to what user asked.

/koji

Received on Friday, 16 October 2015 10:12:26 UTC