Re: [editing] Leading with ContentEditable=Minimal

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 5:23 PM, Ben Peters <Ben.Peters@microsoft.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 5:12 PM, Julie Parent <jparent@google.com> wrote:
> > If Intention events are (temporarily) moved out of scope,
>
> I don’t think I’d say they’re out of scope, just that they will likely not
> be ready as quickly as we could do contentEditable=’minimal’. Do you agree
> with that?
>

Agreed in general, but it would depend on how contentEditable='min' is
actually defined.

> I think this leads us back to the question of what would
> contentEditable='minimal' do exactly?  Enable collapsed selections and
> default handling of cursor movement ... anything else?
>
> Yes we need to define this default functionality. What does everyone think
> about this?
>
> > If this is all it would do, then perhaps what we really want is an
> explicit API to enable cursors?
>
> I think we should still think of this as a path to a full story that
> includes Intention events. Are you saying that ultimately we would have
> something like this?
>
> <div cursor=”true” commandEvents=”true”>minimally editable content</div>
>
> Like all other content, this would also get drag/drop, clipboard, and
> selection events. We would need 3 specs for this- Selection API, minimal
> editing (cursor-only editing?), and CommandEvent.
>

Yes. I really like the idea of explicitly enabling what you want and of
separating the concepts.  Being able to turn on commandEvents independent
of a cursor seems useful.  An API like this leaves far fewer questions of
"what does it do?" than contentEditable="minimal".  What does cursor="true"
do? It turns on the ability for the user or developer to place a cursor,
and default movement.  It has nothing to do with dom modification.  What
does commandEvents="true" do? It enables dispatching commandEvents.  No
ambiguity.  However, this does make me think again about using
beforeinput/input events rather than adding new CommandEvents, since those
would include drag/drop and clipboard as well?