[whatwg] HTML Editing Commands spec minor clarifications

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 5/13/11 12:14 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Tim Down<timdown at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I did some simple tests yesterday that confirm that Gecko generally
>> acts only the first range, and was slightly surprised. I would expect
>> it to affect all ranges in the selection. However, when you select
>> multiple table cells in Gecko (which always creates a range for each
>> selected cell, regardless of whether or not you use the Ctrl key),
>> calling document.execCommand() acts on each range. Only the state of
>> the first range is taken into consideration when deciding what state
>> the selection has, meaning that for a binary command such as Bold, all
>> selected cells are switched to the opposite state to that of the first
>> selected cell.
>
> Yeah, this kind of crazy stuff is why I don't want to spec what Gecko
> does.  I strongly suspect no one ever really thought about the
> behavior, because multi-range selections almost never come up.  I'm
> pretty sure typical authors stand no chance of realizing they exist,
> either.  If I wind up speccing this, I'll make up something sensible.

Note that the table comments above are telling.  If you want to allow 
selection of a table column, you have to allow multirange selection. 
There's just no way about it.

-Boris