Re: [CSS21] [CSS3 Text] Should 'text-transform: uppercase' apply to input type="text" (text entered, typed in text field by user)?

Sylvain Galineau:
> If someone copies/paste something from a web page into their email client and the case changes they are imo far more likely to be surprised and consider it a bug than to think 'oh thank God …'.

You have round-about 6 relevant scenarios when pasting text copied from a webpage:

The target application supports …
 1. only plain text; this includes most GUI widgets.
 2. some styling, but not quite the same as in a browser.
 3. all the styling.
 4. even more styling than the browser.
 5. only graphics.
 6. neither graphics nor text.

Only case 3 is obvious: you retain all the styles the user saw before. It’s probably also the most uncommon case.

In cases 5 and 6 you may try to convert the copied scrap, which is usually possible in an obvious way in case 5 (except for animation, maybe, or sounds) and in case 6 you may try other conversions, e.g. involving speech synthesis.

Cases 1, 2 and 4 are tricky.

You may treat case 4 the same as case 3, but if the target application supports, say, opt-in Open Type features that the browser does not, who is to say it should limit itself to the possibilities of the source application?

In case 2 you might say, just render what’s possible, i.e. use the least common denominator. That may sound sensible, but where do you draw the line? Do you allow approximations? Which are okay and which aren’t? Who decides that?
Actually, the same applies to case 1, the styling possibilities are just very limited. It’s basically the question whether you consider *bold*, _underlined_, /italic/, TRANSFORMED or generated content etc. to be plain text. (There’s no significant difference between these examples.)

In my opinion it is the target application’s job (at the user’s discretion) and not the browser’s to decide what it can do and what it cannot do. Therefore it needs access to either the source code or to a common interchange format which has to support everything HTML/CSS does and more. It’s probably moot to point out that the browser can only play nice here if it transforms text in a soft (style-level), not a hard (character-level) way.

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2012 19:55:13 UTC