range of non-overflown content

Hey,
I spoke to Myles Maxfield (who works on Webkit's line-breaking mechanism)
about what kind of useful information browsers could provide that would
make it easier to do a lot of custom text layouting in Javascript. Even if
that will be very slow, it is still something that will be useful for a lot
of publishing-related things.

Myles shot down several of my ideas, but the one thing he thought was not
unrealistic to ask for was *a range-like description of the parts of the
contents of a container that are NOT overflown*.

Currently there are several ways to try to get this information, involving
functions such as document.caretRangeFromPoint/document
.caretPositionFromPoint, but none of those are entirely stable and easy to
use, AFAIK.

I wonder if we could have some kind of function call to get this
information. If so, which spec would this go into?


-- 
Johannes Wilm