Re: Mutation events replacement

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> I'd really like numbers.  Having looked at the Gecko editor code in the
> past, I don't share your assurance that this is how it works....
>
> That said, if you point to a workload, I (or anyone else; it's open source!)
> can probably generate some numbers by instrumenting the Gecko DOM.  But I
> need a workload.

Pretty much any formatting command is going to involve adding and
removing wrapper elements.  To add a wrapper element, say adding a <b>
around some text to make it bold, you first have to insert the wrapper
before or after the thing you want to wrap, then move all the nodes to
wrap into the wrapper.  Likewise, to remove a wrapper, you have to
first move all its contents adjacent to it, then actually remove it
from its parent.

Likewise, for instance, suppose you delete some text that spans
blocks, like: <p>foo[bar</p><div>baz]quz</div>.  The result will be
something like <p>foo[]quz</p>.  How do you do that?  First delete
"bar" and "baz", then move "quz" to the <p>, then remove the <div>.
Or let's say you have <p>foo[]bar</p> and the user hits Enter -- you
first create an empty <p> after the existing one, then you move "bar"
into it.

Of the 37 execCommand()s I've defined, every single one will commonly
move at least one node within the DOM, except for insertHorizontalRule
and the ones that don't actually change the DOM (copy, selectAll,
styleWithCSS, useCSS).  I defined an algorithm "move preserving
ranges" to handle this because of the range mutation problem:

http://aryeh.name/spec/editcommands/editcommands.html#preserving-ranges

It's invoked in 17 places in my draft currently, and nearly all of
those are in general algorithms that are themselves invoked in
multiple places.

So I don't have any numbers, but anecdotally, editing things
definitely does a lot of moving.  If you want numbers, though, you
probably don't want to look at my implementation -- you want some
real-world software that actually uses mutation events.

Received on Friday, 22 July 2011 15:45:27 UTC