[whatwg] Authoring Re: several messages about HTML5

[Dave Raggett]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

> I agree that HTML DOM is not suitable for WYSIWYG editing.

I beg to differ. It is true that an editing style sheet may be 
needed to avoid problems with delivery style sheets that use the 
display and visibility properties to hide content, or which use CSS 
positioning to layer things in complex ways. But apart from that, 
The HTML DOM is just fine as it is.

Manipulating the DOM is a straightforward matter of tree walking 
algorithms. The really difficulty is understanding what the users 
would like to do. For example, you might type some text and click on 
the list bullet button. The enter key then starts a new paragraph 
within that list item, whilst enter followed immediately by another 
enter starts a new list item. Pressing enter on an empty list item 
closes the list. When it comes to the markup produced, you can 
conceptualize this in terms of a collection of critics that look for 
and fix particular problems, e.g. merging adjacent ul elements, or 
for moving leading and trailing whitespace out of inline elements.

p.s. one missing feature in CSS that would really help would be a 
means to add a forced line break symbol to the rendering of <br> 
elements. It is already easy to add a paragraph symbol, but CSS 
balks at <br> elements for inappropriate reasons.

  Dave Raggett <dsr at w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett