Re: [editing] Should the caret move by default, and should we define this behavior? (#58)

Have you tried to dig down into what current editors do? Basically they try to override everything, IME input/bidi/rtl is likely too complicated for many of those editors who only put 2-3 years of development time into an editor. So I doubt that there is much "common feel" in place today that you can break.

Just take what we are typing in here on Github: I am using Chrome, and I notice that overtype is disabled although it is enabled everywhere else. If I right-click and choose `writing-direction`->`right-to-left` the text moves to the other side. The physical directions of the caret are still respected, but if I type any letter, it is always inserted somewhere completely else than where the caret currently is. The same happens in Gmail. So sorry, also Gmail is broken.

> We really need to understand exactly what's broken with selection and address those issues instead.

We have mentioned several use cases. The way forward, as I can see it, is to follow the Extensible Web Manifesto [1]: Gives us (the web developers) the necessary primitives to implement things ourselves in JavaScript. Once that has been done, and you can tell that there are some common operations that everyone does in the same way and that could gain something from being moved to the browser, then you can add specs with higher layer features on top of the lower layer spec you initially made.

I think it would be helpful to find out if we are going to get any compromise on this part from the part of browser makers, or if browsers are going to continue to try to manage editing down to the smallest detail and make it hard for JS to define or even override anything. If that is the case, then I cannot see how we are going to get any further with this spec then with what already exists. 

[1] https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/

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Received on Wednesday, 3 June 2015 17:58:19 UTC