[whatwg] More HTML Editing Commands questions

Thu May 19 16:33:06 PDT 2011

On 19 May 2011 21:10, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com> wrote:
> (You know that
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML>
> <style>
>    span { border: solid black 1px; }
> </style>
> <p><span>One</span></p><span>
> </span><p><span>Two</span></p>
>
> will behave the same as what you wrote and is just as conformant, right?)

Actually I didn't. Thanks for the tip. I have some HTML5 reading to do.

>> What I have in mind doesn't involve DOM mutation. Imagine the
>> selection is collapsed in the middle of a text node and the bold
>> command is called. The browser now has an internal flag set but there
>> is no change in the DOM. However, if the selection is moved away from
>> its current position, that flag is unset and that position is no
>> longer notionally bold, even if the selection is then returned to its
>> original position before anything else happens. This happens in all
>> browsers. To achieve this with JavaScript running in the page, you
>> need a reliable selection change event. For the purposes of simply
>> tracking the user moving the selection, an asynchronous event would be
>> fine.
>
> Assuming that your goal here is to replicate execCommand() from
> JavaScript, what happens if the user puts the selection somewhere,
> bolds, types something, then moves the selection elsewhere?  I guess
> that works fine if there are reliable input events (are there?), and
> they're ordered properly with respect to the selection change events.

There's no issue in that scenario if there is a selection change event
that fires when the the user does the final selection move. What are
you getting at? Sorry if I'm missing something.

Tim