Re: [w3c/editing] RFC: Contenteditable "indent" implementations are not aligned with popular editors (Issue #437)

> Would it be a good idea to bring the user agents into alignment with the popular editors?

I would be cautious.

Contenteditable/execCommand is seldom a good replacement for JS editors that may use contenteditable to move the selection and receive events, but don't depend on the default browser behavior for content changes. There are other and better technologies already shipping in browsers for this. Making small patches here and there to modernize the behavior of contenteditable will have the effect of luring some JavaScript developers into thinking they can create a working editor based on contenteditable and "just a few lines of code to work around bugs in implementations". A year or two working on their editor, they will realize that it takes a major team and many years effort to build an editor that is really water-tight. Better advice for them would be to try to do what some of the existing editor libraries are doing (have a separate model for the content, diffing dom nodes, etc. to match that behavior) - or to use one of those libraries and just configure them to behave in their custom way.

It sounds like browsers are already in alignment with oneanother. So time spent on this may just be time wasted on the part of browser makers. That being said, if browser developers have the time and can agree on implementing this, I don't see anything wrong with doing it either. It sounds though as if browsers currently behave similarly. It would not be an advantage if a change in just one of the browsers changes this to where there is no alignment any longer.

A spec where such behavior could be added would be the execCommand spec that @zcorpan is working on as the browser native behavior normally matches that of execCommand commands.

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Received on Friday, 1 September 2023 14:14:47 UTC