<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Aug 14, 2010, at 10:14 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Adam Barth <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:w3c@adambarth.com">w3c@adambarth.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
That's difficult to say given that it's supported in most browsers.<br>
We'd need to look for folks complaining to Mozilla. There's a tree of<br>
duplicate bug reports that lead to<br>
<<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264412" target="_blank">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264412</a>>, but none since<br>
2006. In 2006, you said you'd probably add it to HTML5:<br>
<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343357#c2" target="_blank">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343357#c2</a>. :)<br>
<br>
I doubt that IE or WebKit will remove support at this point, which<br>
leaves this as an inviting interoperability trap for developers who<br>
don't test in every browser.<br></blockquote><div> </div></div>If it's not needed for compatibility, why wouldn't Webkit consider removing it?<br clear="all"></blockquote></div><br><div>We'd probably weigh the following factors:</div><div><br></div><div>- Is it likely WebKit-specific content relies on it?</div><div> Probably yes.</div><div>- Is it a genuinely useful feature? </div><div> Yes, the ability to get plaintext content as rendered is a useful feature and annoying to implement from scratch. To give one very marginal data point, it's used by our regression text framework to output the plaintext version of a page, for tests where layout is irrelevant. A more hypothetical use would be a rich text editor that has a "convert to plaintext" feature. textContent is not as useful for these use cases, since it doesn't handle line breaks and unrendered whitespace properly.</div><div>- Do other browsers implement it?</div><div> Seems like all but Firefox do.</div><div><br></div><div>These factors would tend to weigh against removing it.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div>On Aug 14, 2010, at 11:16 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div class="gmail_quote"><div> Wouldn't you consider the interoperability benefits to the Web platform?</div></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>We do consider this, but since the status quo is "every browser but Firefox implements it", it's not clear that flipping WebKit-based browsers from one column to the other is a genuine interoperability improvement. Nor does it seem clear that changing all other browsers to match the odd man out is even the best overall strategy to getting there.</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>Maciej</div><div><br></div></body></html>