Re: [w3c/editing] Updated the intro material to better reflect the current status. (#302)

Having browsed the August 2015 messages, I have even less understanding
of the objections to the very minimal changes in my pull request.

The Chrome team seems to have been doing what they apparently said they
were doing, i.e. converging to some extent with the Mozilla
implementation.

If I were ever to do any significant amount of work on the execCommand
spec, my goal would be to end up with essentially a descriptive, not a
normative, document. In other words, I would try to produce a document
that described a common subset of execCommand functionality that the
major browsers (Chrome, Android, Firefox, Safari) already implement,
omitting behaviour that conflicts with other standards. I'm coming at
it from a "user" standpoint (my background is website development, not
browser development) and of course a website developer needs a document
that tells what is going to work in all (recent) browsers. As people on
that thread already pointed out, no browser is going to throw away
execCommand in the foreseeable future, and any new browser would have
to implement it.
So a specification is needed, and the present state of the spec is far
from adequate.

I understand that this isn't how the standards community normally
works. Maybe that means that I'm not the right person to do this. But
the present state of the spec helps nobody and guides nobody. Saying
that execCommand is obsolete, and that all the websites currently using
it will have to migrate to a forthcoming replacement, is egregiously
unrealistic.

Discussion, and consensus with browser developers, would be needed
before putting anything in the spec beyond what all major browsers do
already. But I'm not proposing any such extension, so where is the
controversy?

On Sat, 2021-07-24 at 09:22 -0700, Johannes Wilm wrote:
> The initial discussion about this was mainly on the email list. Try
> reading the email thread with the title "existing contenteditable
> spec" [1] That then turned into a meeting. A few months later, the
> wording again came up for discussion under the thread "on
> execCommand() and script-triggered copy/cut/paste" [2]. The parts
> that were discussed at informal parts of the F2F meetings were not
> captured there. If I recall correctly, it was mainly a question of
> whether the feature should be marked as "deprecated" or whether it
> should be classified as "we may work on this again some time in the
> future". Especially the Chromium team was very clear about their
> view: they would not change their implementation due to anything any
> spec would ever say, but they might under some circumstances change
> their implementation of individual features to be closer to that of
> other browsers. The final wording there was carefully negotiated and
> was not easily reached at as there were several different positions
> to cover.
> It is true that positions may change and that may just have happened
> here. But given that it has been a major decision to go away from
> trying to get execCommand to work for editors and instead to work on
> other mechanisms, and that this wording was negotiated, I think such
> a change would at the least be needed to be discussed on the mailing
> list and all the involved parties should be consulted.
> So yes - let's put this on the agenda for a call or let's have a new
> discussion on the email list about this. And I would think that
> @njdjacobs should probably sign some type of agreement with the W3C,
> as such a discussion would possibly also involve things that are
> relevant in terms of intellectual property, licenses, etc. .
> [1]
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-editing-tf/2015May/thread.html

> [2]
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-editing-tf/2015Aug/thread.html

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