[whatwg] contenteditable="" needs fixing

Anne van Kesteren fora at annevankesteren.nl
Wed Jul 12 03:10:48 PDT 2006


Quoting Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch>:
>>>> Furthermore, attribute values other than
>>>> "true", "false" or the empty string "" cause the attribute to be
>>>> ignored.
>>>
>>> Why? Do we really need to support this? What pages depend on this?
>>
>> Can you give me a good reason to deviate from what Internet Explorer does?
>
> A lot of what IE does is completely insane. While what we do should _work_
> in IE, that doesn't mean that everything IE does should work in all
> browsers. At the extreme edge of this we have things like the cases where
> IE crashes, but this is just another instance of it -- why have a
> three-state attribute when you can just as easily have a two-state
> attribute?
>
> We're not just sheep, following whatever Microsoft does. We have to think
> about the value of the features we are adding.

Sure, but this behavior actually makes sense to me. It's just an error  
handling rule for when the value is not the empty string (to allow  
<div contenteditable>, true, or false)... In other words, it makes:

   <div contenteditable><p></div>

... equivalent to:

   <div contenteditable><p contenteditable=x-test></div>

... which doesn't seem that bad. This doesn't change how  
contentEditable, isContentEditable or anything would work.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>




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