[whatwg] What exactly is contentEditable for?

[Matthew Raymond]

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 
>>From a semantic point of view contentEditable is much better than a textarea hack.
> 
> contentEditiable is not semantic, it's behavioural and belongs in the 
> DOM interface only, not the markup.

   Yeah, I think you may have a point. It may make more sense to enable
editing of DOM Ranges through scripting rather than putting it in
markup. After all, if we're going to be dynamically inserting and
removing |contenteditable| all over the place, we're already using
scripting. On the other hand, if you have a static block that you're
going to edit and submit, an actual control makes more sense, be it
<htmlarea> or <textarea accept="text/html">.

   Hmm. IE supports the .contentEditable property, so why not just drop
the HTML attribute |contenteditable| and leave the DOM property? Not as
good as DOM ranges, but that sounds kinda complicated anyways.

   Nutshell: Allow .contentEditable, but get rid of |contenteditable|.