[whatwg] Regarding rich text editing

[Matthew Raymond]

Max Romantschuk wrote:
> In secion 1.5. (Missing features) of the  it states that (among other 
> things) a rich text editing or HTML editing control was ejected for this 
> version of the specification.

    It was moved to Web Apps 1.0.

    http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#requirements

> I feel that a rich text editing control should be considered for 
> inclusion after all. It might be that there is some serious issue I 
> haven't considered, so it would be nice to hear the original grounds for 
> rejection.

    Web Forms 2.0 is targeted to the common needs of web authors. 
Advanced widgets like RTF controls, menus and toolbars are the domain of 
Web Apps 1.0. (Near as I can tell, Web Controls 1.0 is intended add 
functionality to Javascript and CSS that aid the the creation of custom 
widgets. However, this will be influenced by the design of XBL2, so I 
doubt we'll be seeing a draft of that spec any time soon.)

> I believe that a standardised interface for rich text editing would be a 
> very good addition to Web Forms 2, despite the issues with creating a 
> solid specification for something this complex.

    I wouldn't mind having something like a RTF control in WF2, since 
text areas where people input markup are fairly common these days, but 
my main concern with RTF is that the actual RTF format is suboptimal. It 
would be better to define a control with some basic HTML editing support 
and can submit in [X]HTML. Also, this control would probably need some 
method giving the author the power to limit what markup can be used.

    Actually, now that I think about it, something of the complexity of 
an HTML editing control needs to be in Web Apps 1.0.

> I won't open up discussion on actual implementation just yet, but I 
> would like to hear the opinions of other list participants on this 
> issue. Does anyone else think this would be a good thing?

    I don't think anyone thinks it's a bad idea. The question is simply 
whether Web Forms 2.0 is the best WHAT WG spec to put this in. I think 
whether this belongs in WF2, however, has a lot to do with 
implementation, so I'd encourage you to get into implementation details, 
because there are probably a lot of ideas out there waiting to get out.