[whatwg] Syntax Highlighting [was: several messages]

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, James Graham wrote:
> > 
> > They don't. At least, none of the browsers I know about have syntax 
> > highlighting editors of that kind, as far as I know.
>
> I would have thought that any browser using a standard widget set might 
> already have syntax highlighting avaliable (but disabled). However I 
> neglected the fact that most browsers use custom widget sets to deal 
> with CSS requirements.

As far as I know, even standard widgets don't do syntax highlighting 
editors, but I may be wrong.


> That's not quite true; Safari has AFAIK implemented spell checking in 
> text areas for some time, Lindows have implemented it in Mozilla and are 
> now contributing the code to mozilla.org [1] and a quick check on Google 
> indicates that Opera supports spell checking with Aspell [2] and that 
> there exist several spell checking addons for IE. So basic spell 
> checking is avaliable, or at least imminently avaliable, in one way or 
> another for all major graphical UAs.

True. Maybe a WF3 feature, then.

> I'm not sure why. It has almost no side effects since it's just a hint 
> to the client and doesn't affect the actual data being uploaded in any 
> way. It it perfectly backwards compatible. Since many HTML applications 
> require text entry and most people who edit text (other than in a web 
> form) choose to use an editor other than notepad there is clearly demand 
> for better-than-notepad text editing in HTML. Without information about 
> the data type expected, UAs can't really provide this. With that 
> information they can.

Because it has almost no side effects since it's just a hint to the 
client. It just isn't something that people are going to implement any 
time soon (it's exactly the kind of feature that gets delayed to later 
releases over and over), and I'd rather not add features to WF2 that 
aren't going to have a big impact or be easy to implement well.

At this point I'm looking for things to drop, not things to add. :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'