RE: [editing] CommandEvent and contentEditable=minimal Explainer

I don’t think we need to specify the default behavior. We can instead just say that all editing behaviors must fire Intention events that are cancellable. Any events that are already defined (like Clipboard) will continue to work, and others should fire CommandEvents as necessary.

We will likely need to have a list of well-known Command Events (like bold, undo, etc) just so we can have a shape for the related CommandData object, but we don’t need to specify the default behavior of those events.

From: Piotr Koszuliński [mailto:p.koszulinski@cksource.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 2:40 PM
To: Ben Peters
Cc: Julie Parent; public-webapps@w3.org
Subject: Re: [editing] CommandEvent and contentEditable=minimal Explainer

But what is the "default" behaviour then? What will we be preventing? There's no accepted specification for current contentEditable=true AFAIK, so I thought that the goal of contentEditable=minimal is to avoid the need to write a specification for contentEditable=true. Otherwise, developers may demand from browser vendors that they fix their contentEditable=true implementations and I don't think that anyone wants that. Why not forget about contentEditable=true, make it deprecated and create specification only for algorithms needed by contentEditable=minimal and all required command events?

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Ben Peters <Ben.Peters@microsoft.com<mailto:Ben.Peters@microsoft.com>> wrote:
Great idea! If Intention Events (Clipboard, Selection, Command) cover all of the editing operations that a site would want to handle themselves, we don’t need CE Min as a feature, only a concept that can achieved with preventDefault().

From: Julie Parent [mailto:jparent@gmail.com<mailto:jparent@gmail.com>]
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2014 4:40 PM
To: Ben Peters
Cc: public-webapps@w3.org<mailto:public-webapps@w3.org>
Subject: Re: [editing] CommandEvent and contentEditable=minimal Explainer

The discussion of which minimal default handling to include with contenteditable="minimal" makes me wonder if contentEditable="minimal" is necessary at all.  It quickly becomes a can of worms of *which* default handling should be included, and it seems likely to not satisfy every use case no matter which decisions are made.  However, "minimal" is proposed as a building block because currently, disabling all default functionality of contentEditable="true" is difficult/impossible.  But with CommandEvents, shouldn't contentEditable="minimal" be equivalent to:

// Let editRegion be <div contentEditable id='editRegion'>

var editRegion = document.getElementById("editRegion");
editRegion.addEventListener("command", handleCommand);
function handleCommand(evt){
  evt.preventDefault();
}

No default actions would be taken, but selection events would still fire and be handled.  There would be no ambiguity.  If implementing contentEditable="minimal" on top of CommandEvents could just be a few lines of code, why complicate things by spec'ing another property?

Then, if someone wants a region that just does basic text input, then they simply allow it:
function handleCommand(evt){
 switch (evt.commandType){
   case 'insertText':
     // Let the browser do text insertion
     break;
   default:
     // Prevent all other magic
     evt.preventDefault();
}

This hedges on the fact that CommandEvents would capture ALL the cases that contentEditable currently handles, and that the event would fire BEFORE the dom is modified, and that calling preventDefault would cancel the event, but isn't that a goal of this design anyway?

Julie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ben Peters <Ben.Peters@microsoft.com<mailto:Ben.Peters@microsoft.com>>
Date: Thu, May 22, 2014 at 4:56 PM
Subject: [editing] CommandEvent and contentEditable=minimal Explainer
To: "public-webapps@w3.org<mailto:public-webapps@w3.org>" <public-webapps@w3.org<mailto:public-webapps@w3.org>>


I have completed a first-draft explainer document [1], taking the generous feedback of many of you into account. There are 6 open issues on the document currently, and I'm sure there are others that I have missed. It would be great to know if this is heading in in the right direction.

My vision is to use this a non-normative Explainer, and create 2 normative specs to go with it. The specs for contentEditable=minimal and CommandEvent should have first-drafts next week.

Thanks!
Ben

[1] http://benjamp.github.io/commands-explainer.htm





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Piotrek Koszuliński
CKEditor JavaScript Lead Developer