[whatwg] Standard method to get/set caret position
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Fri Nov 12 08:01:11 PST 2004
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, martijn wrote:
> >
> > Sadly the Mozilla APIs you used in your example aren't perfect either -- the
> > cursor could be at either selectionStart or selectionEnd, you don't really
> > have a way of knowing.
>
> It seems to me that the selection is the position of the cursor, not? When you
> press the left arrow key, the selection collapses and the cursor is at the
> start of where the selection was. With the right arrow key, the selection
> collapses and the cursor is at the end of where the selection was. Why should
> there also be a caret?
That describes the behaviour on some, but not all, platforms.
> > DOM Range could be used to define the selection of the document but
> > that wouldn't work for selections in input and textarea elements since
> > those don't have DOM nodes they correspond to. We could define that
> > they do but that's quite a big change.
>
> I would certainly be in favor of that, because I like the range document
> object model. I think the change that would be necessary is that typing
> text inside text inputs and textareas should change the corresponding
> value attribute and for the textarea the textnode inside the textarea.
There's no way we're going to change that. That'd never be backwards
compatible. :-)
> > Mozilla's window.getSelection() method doesn't actually return a DOM
> > Range, it returns some custom interface.
>
> Yes, it holds a collection of all the ranges you have added to the
> selection object. so i't possible to have multiple selections in one
> document.
Yeah.
> > So I don't know. What do people think? Should we try to be backards
> > compatible with the Mozilla interface or the IE interface, or should
> > we start from scratch here, and require that people write wrappers
> > around the Moz and IE wrappers if they want compatibility? If we use
> > something already defined, what do we use? What are the use cases that
> > matter?
>
> I'm in favor of the Mozilla interface.
That's my current inclination too (just so I can avoid more headaches
from reading MSDN's description of selections...).
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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