[whatwg] Embedding images within editable content

[Martin Atkins]

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 2:53 AM, Shital Shah <sytelus at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I'm wondering if there are any ideas being discussed to add an ability so
>> users can embed images in editable areas.
>>
[snip]
> 
> I'm confused about what you're asking.  All decent WYSIWYG editors
> *do* allow users to insert images, and often other media.  You can see
> the image right in the display next to all the text while you're
> editting it.
> 

I don't know what the original poster was asking about, but one issue 
I've encountered in this area is that users want to embed images from 
their own local drives rather than having to separately upload them to 
the server first.

Unfortunately, the in-browser editors often make it look like this is 
going to work; users manage to get embedded images with file:// URLs 
that seem to work for that user but obviously will not work for any 
other user.

However, I'm not sure what the solution is here. If contentEditable was 
a "real" form widget you could imagine it supporting a 
multipart/form-data upload of all of its contained images, or something. 
However, as long as client-side code is manually shifting the data to 
and from real widgets it's not clear how to do this since you can't just 
create a file-upload control with the filename pre-populated and submit 
it transparently.