Re: RichTextInput03

Henrik Dvergsdal wrote:
> I fully support your thoughts on this. However, from the previous  
> discussion it now seems to me that we need a control that borrows  
> aspects from
> 
> * the textarea control (textual input and output),

   Note that WF2 allows you to specify the type of content for a <textarea>:

| <textarea name="myHTML" accept="text/html"> ... </textarea>

   WF2 doesn't require any specific features or rendering that are
required to be supported, and it's fairly clear that it's not
necessarily for WYSIWYG editing. It's more for things like syntax
checking, spell checking, et cetera. However, for certain things like
text editing of HTML or editing a MediaWiki page, this could be highly
useful.

   In theory, we could allow <textarea> to have WYSIWYG semantics for
certain MIME types, but that's really stretching the term "text area"...

> * the file input control (HTTP transfer and security mechanisms)

   Not sure what you mean. From a data security perspective, how is an
HTML/XML document or document fragment any different from transmitting
someone's credit card number or personal data?

> * the object element (tool/plugin/api selection, parametrization and  
> styling)

   Note that the <object> element is already a control, and has a |name|
attribute [1][2]. In theory, we could just add a |name| attribute to
make it editable:

| <object data="template.html" type="text/html" name="myHTML">
|   <textarea name="myHTML" accept="text/html"> ... </textarea>
| </object>

   However, this is suboptimal because the contents are the fallback
rather than the markup to be edited.

> In addition to this, of course, we need the xml validation step and  
> related error handling mechanisms.

   Controls that handle XML-based data should validate and handle
errors, but the server MUST do so anyways to deal with security risks
and non-compliant or buggy user agents.

   It would be nice to have a new element ("<htmlarea>" perhaps?), but
that offers poor backwards compatibility. I don't happen to think that
there's a strong use case for editing XML with a WYSIWYG editor in a web
page though. If you think about how often you currently edit XML with a
<textarea> or |contenteditable|, you'll quickly get the idea.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#edef-OBJECT
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#object-control

Received on Wednesday, 28 March 2007 02:12:33 UTC