[whatwg] Ongoing work on an editing commands (execCommand()) specification

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan at mozilla.com> wrote:

> You're proposing to remove something from Gecko and Webkit which has been
> supported for many years (about 8 years for Gecko).  We do not have the
> ability to make sure that nobody is relying on this in any of the billions
> of available web sites.  Unless you have a very strong argument on why we
> should remove support for an API as old as this one, I'm not sure that we're
> going to do that, and I think that Webkit might have similar constraints as
> well.  So far, the argument that you've proposed is extrapolating the
> assumption that this API doesn't have any users from three implementations
> which use the editing APIs.  I'm afraid you should have a _much_ larger
> sample if you want to draw this conclusion.
>
> I would personally very much like to get one of the two modes killed in
> favor of the other, since that means an easier spec to implement, less code
> to maintain, and easier life for me.  But I think we should carefully think
> about what this would means for potential users who are using the CSS mode
> in their applications.
>

We can deprecate the CSS mode and leave it unspecified, without removing it
from Webkit and Gecko. That won't hurt interop since anyone using it is
probably UA-sniffing already.

If sometime in the future we decide that a "CSS mode" is worth having, then
someone can start writing a spec for it then.

Rob
-- 
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