Re: What are we trying to solve with document.designMode?

Note: Personal comment, not a WG response.

On Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:59:50 +0200, <benjamin.poulain@nokia.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I was looking at behavior differences between browsers and the spec  
> regarding document.designMode.
>
> The way the attribute is defined in the spec makes it just another way  
> to formulate contentEditable for the document. With such a definition,  
> it seems overkill to have it since there are already 2 more generic ways  
> to express the same thing: contentEditable and CSS's user-modify.
>
> The implementation differs from the specification in the sense that you  
> cannot override the designMode by a child with contentEditable. See:
> -https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22036
> -https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462735
>
> According to its documentation, the way designMode works on Internet  
> Explorer is yet another behavior:  
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533720%28VS.85%29.aspx
>
> With my current understanding of the problem, I think this should be  
> removed from the specification or explicitly deprecated. The differences  
> between released browser make the attribute unreliable for web authors.  
> I could not find in the archives why designMode was added to the spec, I  
> would be interested to the rationale behind this feature.

designMode is needed for Web compat. If the spec doesn't match browsers,  
please file spec bugs.

cheers
-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Tuesday, 26 April 2011 14:05:08 UTC