[whatwg] keyboard behaviour inside of editable area

timeless timeless at gmail.com
Tue Oct 20 03:14:36 PDT 2009


On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> there's nothing that really requires that the
> user agent even support arrow keys, let alone that they work in a
> particular way.

I believe MicroB, Fennec, and probably Mobile Safari will tend to
treat form controls as very special.

I don't see any reason to specify this, as in reality, it's up to the
browser and platform to decide how such things should work. Ideally
the teams developing such platforms will evolve solutions which work
for their users. If they don't, I'd expect their users to act as
consumers and vote with their wallets/eyeballs.... (Sadly, that is
unlikely to be a good thing for MicroB).

Of note, the N900 in most regional variants doesn't have up/down arrow
keys. And when people specify how arrow keys work in contentEditable,
i'd expect them to try to specify how arrow keys work while <shift> is
active (an attempt to influence selection length/shape).

I've heard rumors that Qt has (plans?) for some magical way to control position.

Alexander Surkov's proposal also doesn't covered BiDi behavior....

Also, it's unclear to me what the goal is. Should I, as an end user of
an editable page, be able to edit a <select> to add/remove/change
items?


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