[whatwg] HTML-to-plaintext conversion (innerText and Selection.toString())
Boris Zbarsky
bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Fri Feb 4 12:15:53 PST 2011
On 2/4/11 2:59 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Boris Zbarsky<bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
>> Until they try to use it on a disconnected subtree and it does something
>> weird, right?
>
> Well, it shouldn't do weird stuff on a disconnected subree. :) It
> doesn't in IE.
I thought you said Webkit would refuse to implement that sort of behavior?
>> This whole thing seems to me like an exercise in premature standardization.
>> Browsers are actively experimenting with their dom-to-text conversion APIs.
>> It'd be nice if it were happening behind vendor prefixes, but they started
>> before such prefixing was popular in the DOM world.
>
> Authors are using these features
Yes, I realize that.
> and they're implemented inconsistently.
Yes, I also realize that. That's what it means that UAs are experimenting!
> If browsers are experimenting and you think there's
> some chance that we'll eventually get a standardizable algorithm
I have no idea whether they will, because I'm still not sure what
problems we're trying to solve here...
> then I don't see why the new algorithm can't use a new prefixed name
while
> we reserve the legacy names for legacy-compatible behavior.
Compatible with what legacy? We have at least 4 different legacies
here, right?
> From what WebKit and Opera people have told me, innerText is necessary
> for web-compat for non-Gecko browsers. There are sites out there that
> use textContent if they sniff Firefox, and innerText otherwise.
That's really unfortunate (esp. if they actually sniff for "Firefox"). :(
> innerText apparently can't be exactly the same as textContent --
> Maciej said that "I know that if<br> doesn't produce newlines, stuff
> will break"
But the "Firefox" path takes the textContent and does its own newline
processing or something?
> and Opera does add extra newlines for<br> (but doesn't
> seem to change much else).
I could live with an innerText that was textContent but converted <br>
to newline, I guess...
> I'm slightly less sure about Selection.toString(), but I'd be inclined
> to take the same general approach. It's much better for authors to
> have to code around browsers not offering them enough features than to
> code around browsers offering them incompatible features. At least
> then they only have to do the coding work once.
I still think it'll really confuse authors that Selection.toString()
won't do the same thing as copying. But maybe I overestimate the
problems it would cause....
-Boris
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