- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:26:21 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Tim Down wrote: > On 6 January 2011 21:53, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote: > > On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, benjamin.poulain at nokia.com wrote: > >> > >> I would like to suggest a change for the main HTML 5 specification: > >> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ > >> > >> The problem I have is with the Window object specification > >> (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-window-object ). > >> It does not mention the method find() which can be found on most engines > >> (e.g.: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.find ). > > > > It looks like IE doesn't implement this, so it's probably not strictly > > required for compat with the Web. > > > > What are the use cases for this feature? > > It's useful for custom search features. I've recommended it a few > times on Stack Overflow for people wanting to highlight or somehow > style all occurrences of a piece of text that may span nodes (it's > this part that is the compelling feature). You can achieve the same > using TextRange in IE. For example: > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5886858/full-text-search-in-html-ignoring-tags > > I think this is a valid use case. On a related note, I would like to > see equivalents of some of the text-based methods in IE's TextRange > make their way into Range, but that's a separate issue. So really it's not for use as a UI feature, but as a way to get Range objects for modifying the DOM. Interesting. On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > > However, the implementation here doesn't do what you'd want: it selects > the text, destroying any existing selection. You can work around it by > preserving and then restoring the selection somehow, but it's not ideal > at all. It would make much more sense to have a function that returned > a Range or list of Ranges. So I guess we have to make a decision for the platform here. Do we want: - To spec window.find() in all its historical glory, and have it implemented everywhere? - To spec a subset of window.find() that just does the use case described above, namely to destructively change the selection to a matching part of the DOM so that it can be manipulated by script? - To spec a new API that just returns matching ranges and then allows those ranges to be manipulated like the selection can be today? - To encourage authors to write a library that does this for them, and not bother to provide a dedicated API at all? Which would implementations that don't do the full window.find() today be willing to do? -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 11:26:21 UTC