IME events

Hey guys,
[+Bono Hironori from Chromium]

I've just had a lengthy email discussion about IMEs with Nakano Masayuki of
Mozilla. I think there's a few pieces missing so far in diagrams [3] and [4]
linked in the previous email. There's a few points to discuss (hopefully in
detail during the telcon) but I'll just raise a couple now, to see what
thoughts people have for starters:

1) Non-key input (clicking an option in an IME menu, speech input, etc)
2) TSF (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms629032(VS.85).aspx) for
Windows involves requiring locking of the text whilst the IME makes changes,
then unlocking. I'd like to see the web app have some control over this. For
example, to prepare a section of the document for change, and have a
contract between the app and the browser about what parts are OK to change
and what aren't (otherwise it's back to relying on mutation events if the
app can't be certain about which parts of the DOM the browser will touch and
which it won't). This is an example of something fairly complicated, I
wonder what other kinds of IME APIs there are that have similar complexities
- I'm no expert.

On a higher level note, the main thing I'd like to see is the web app being
able to preview and have control over any changes the browser wishes to make
to the DOM in a contentEditable region. That way mutation events won't be
needed at all for those use cases (they are barely usable now anyway,
because they (a) do not give much information about user intent - did the
user just type, or paste, or hit undo, who knows? and (b) they are mostly
after-the-fact, always non-cancelable, etc).

Cheers,
Dan

On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 10:49 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi, Folks-
>
> I will be hosting a F2F at my house next week, but we will be reconvening
> the telcons week after next, probably on Wednesday, June 17 or Thursday,
> June 18.  Either day works for me, but finding a good time for everyone
> might be challenging: we typically have attendees from Finland (Olli Pettay
> of Mozilla), from US West Coast (Travis Leithead and Jacob ??, of
> Microsoft), US East Coast (myself, and sometimes some government folks who
> are helping with testing), and now Sydney, Australia (Dan Danilatos, of
> Google Wave). [1]
>
> Olli says:
>  "For me the best days are Wednesday and Thursday, 10:00am-01:00am (EET).
>  Monday and Tuesday evenings/nights are also possible."
>
> Travis says:
>  "Jacob and I are available for telecons 8-5 pm (perhaps a little
>  later if needed)."
>
> Pretty much any time on Wednesday or Thursday works for me (late afternoon
> is best).  Looking at TimeAndDate [2], it looks like 21:00 UTC on Wednesday
> might work, if Dan is a morning person (otherwise it would be pretty cruel
> to him).
>
>
> The proposed agenda is (what else?) mutation events and a sane keyboard
> model.  The telcon will last one hour.  So, I would greatly appreciate
> keeping up the email dialog on mutation events (I will compile the use cases
> and requirements on the wiki, as they roll in).  It may be that we don't
> "solve" mutation events for DOM3 Events, but put together another dedicated
> spec to address the use cases in another way, and caution people about the
> costs of mutation events.
>
> In addition, I'm hoping that we have a flowchart of keyboard event models
> by that time, for both IE (Travis and Jacob are working on this), and if
> possible, for WebKit.  We have my rough draft of an idealized model [3], and
> Olli's more accurate Gecko model [4].
>
> Dan, or anyone on your team, or anyone at all, could you work on a WebKit
> keyboard event model flowchart?
>
> When I get them all, I'll normalize them for easy comparison, and we can
> work to produce a unified model that works as widely as possible.  If anyone
> wants to send in addition flowcharts for other implementations (including
> mobiles), that would also be welcome.  I don't know that we'll be able to
> solve the IME issues, but if we can, we will.
>
> [1]
> http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?month=6&day=17&year=2009&p2=43&p3=101&p4=234&p5=240&iv=0
> [2]
> http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingdetails.html?year=2009&month=6&day=17&hour=21&min=0&sec=0&p1=43&p2=101&p3=234&p4=240
> [3]
> http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/proposals/d3e-keyflow.svg
> [4]
> http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/proposals/keyflow-gecko.svg
>
>
> Regards-
> -Doug Schepers
> W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs
>
>