Re: New rich editing roadmap position paper

Hey,
thanks for posting this. Some of us received this a few weeks ago, and
given that this may change a lot, I have not posted a preliminary schedule
for the meeting at tpac until now.

My first reaction to this is a bit a mix of:

A) I'd wished you two had participated in the TF more actively in the past.
That could have helped you guys understand why the TF ended up with working
on contenteditable the way it has done. It could also have helped us
understand that Chromium is now heading in a new direction.

B) This seems to say that one should not make great new plans but then goes
on to make grand suggestions of things that sound like they will need a
decade to get fully specced and implemented in all browser engines. It
seems it would be much less work to fix the Android IME to be compliant
with input events level 2 as it is now, or find an alternative way of
reaching what level 2 does rather than start with a completely new approach.

C) The approach of using a hidden textarea is not entirely insane. It will
create some new challenges, such as figuring out vertical caret movement,
but there are issues with all approaches and this may work for some as it
already does for Google Docs. However, there are also advantages to
cE-based approaches and several attempts of making non-cE editors in recent
years were given up. I don't think it's a good idea for us to take this
decision for all editor projects. Writing a production-ready editors will
take several years and many iterations weighing all tge advantages and
disadvantages against each other and trying things out with realworld
users. We likely should not think we can replace this process by an
arbitrary decision we make among ourselves after a 30 minute discussion.

So yes, I'm rather critical. But I think several of the concrete action
points are something for us to look at.

We should probably put this on the schedule as one of the first items just
to figure out if it still makes sense for us to continue work on any of the
things we have been working on so far.

Given that you will be leaving Chromium, will this be the official Chromium
position going forward?

On 21 Oct 2017 22:09, "Alexandre Elias" <aelias@chromium.org> wrote:

> Hi, after I was involved in the IME event level debate, I was asked to
> formulate my opinion on where I think things should evolve instead, based
> on my experience with Android IME.  Here is my position paper on that,
> which I've already passed around to other Chromium-team members and
> incorporated their feedback:
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/10qltJUVg1-Rlnbjc6RH8WnngpJptMEj-
> tyrvIZBPSfY/edit
>
> It's a new approach involving hidden textareas which I believe avoids the
> pitfalls of previous variants of that idea.  More importantly, each of the
> individual standardization items should be small, uncontroversial and
> compatible with other visions -- because I don't expect or want to force
> everyone to hidden textareas.  Basically, it's a way of framing small
> practical subprojects in a way that they appear as incremental steps
> towards eventually enabling a full Office-style text editor.
>
> One more note: I'll be leaving Chromium-team at the end of this month so I
> unfortunately won't be able to defend the position at TPAC.  Chromium-team
> editing folks have mostly been positive about this roadmap, but are still
> overall debating how and how much to invest in editing, so I'm putting this
> paper out there as a starting point for future discussion that I won't be
> involved in.
>