Re: proposal: add input/keyboard locale to text and keyboard events

After discussions and modifications at the i18n WG teleconferences and in
public-i18n-core@, the i18n WG has approved the following updated proposal
and is now turning it back over to www-dom@.

Proposal: An additional property in the TextEvent and KeyboardEvent DOM3
interfaces to indicate the locale of the keyboard or other input device
using which the input was generated. When this is unknown (e.g. when
theinput method
is paste, or when the implementation can not obtain this information from
the underlying platform), the property should be null (or perhaps undefined,
whichever conforms to DOM3 conventions better).

Here is a draft for the documentation of the new event attributes, striving
to conform in style to
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/html/DOM3-Events.html#events-textevents

In TextEvent:

inputLocale of type DOMString, readonly
    A BCP-47 tag indicating the locale for which the origin of the event
(whether keyboard, IME, handwriting recognition software, or other input
mode) is configured, e.g. "en-US". May be null [undefined?] when
inapplicable or unknown, e.g. for pasted text or when this information
isnot exposed by
the underlying platform.

    Note: inputLocale does not necessarily indicate the locale of the data
or the context in which it is being entered. For example, a French user
often may not switch to an English keyboard when typing English, in which
case the inputLocale will still indicate French, even though the data
isactually English.

In KeyboardEvent:

inputLocale of type DOMString, readonly
    A BCP-47 tag indicating the locale for which the keyboard used to
generate the event is configured, e.g. en-US. May be null [undefined?] when
unknown, e.g. when this information is not exposed by the underlying
platform.

    Note: inputLocale does not necessarily indicate the locale of the text
that the user may be keying in. For example, a French user often may not
switch to an English keyboard when typing English, in which case
theinputLocale will
still indicate French. Nor can it be used to definitively calculate
the"physical" or "virtual" key associated with
the event, or the character printed on that key.



On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin
<aharon@google.com>wrote:

> Pierre Cadieux, Hirinori Bono and I would like to propose the following
> i18n addition to the TextEvent and KeyboardEvent DOM3 interfaces:
>
> A new property indicating the locale of the keyboard or other input device
> using which the input was generated.
>
> In both event types, this should be a string (e.g. "en-US"), and can be
> null when unknown (e.g. when the input method is paste). In the TextEvent
> interface, the new property could be called inputLocale. In the
> KeyboardEvent interface, it could be called keyboardLocale or perhaps just
> locale.
>
> Use case 1: smart quotes in script-based online editor / word processor.
>
> Different languages use different opening and closing quotation mark
> characters (e.g. U+201C (“) and U+201D (”) in English, U+00AB («) and U+00BB
> (») in French, and U+201E („) and U+201C (“) in German), but their standard
> keyboards rarely allocate keys for them. Thus, word processors typically
> implement a "smart quote" feature that replaces ASCII quote characters typed
> by the user with the opening and closing quotation marks appropriate for the
> document language. Since users rarely want to bother setting a document
> language, and can use different languages in a single document, word
> processor programs often the keyboard language as the basis for deciding
> which quotation marks to use. This is currently not possible for online
> editors, since they do not know which keyboard is being used to generate
> input.
>
> Use case 2: text direction in script-based online editor / word processor.
>
> Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and other languages are written right-to-left.
> However, it is common for right-to-left documents to contain some
> left-to-right words (e.g. acronyms like "HTML"), phrases (like the title of
> a foreign-language article), and paragraphs (like an extended quote from a
> foreign-language article). Although the Unicode Bidi Algorithm provides a
> default way to display a mixture of left-to-right and right-to-left text
> without explicit indication of a paragraph's direction, or where the text
> direction inside a paragraph changes or reverts, this is heuristic and often
> insufficient to display bidi text as intended. Full-featured word processors
> (online and otherwise) therefore typically allow the user to indicate the
> paragraph direction using a UI control. However, the user experience of
> having to both click on the direction control and change the keyboard
> language when needing to switch between different-direction languages is
> problematic, since users very often forget to do one or the other. It is
> therefore desirable for a word processor to provide a reasonable default for
> paragraph direction based on the direction of the first character entered by
> the user. To allow the same approach for paragraphs that begin with numbers,
> neutral characters, and whitespace, however, what one really wants is an
> indication of the language of the keyboard (or other input method) used to
> generate the first character. The same technique is even more useful for
> direction changes inside a paragraph, since word processors rarely provide
> an explicit means of indicating them, and they often need to begin with a
> number or end in punctuation (e.g. closing a parenthetical expression begun
> in the middle of the opposite-direction phrase) - examples of cases where
> the Unicode Bidi Algorithm does not do a good enough job.
>
> Aharon Lanin
>