[whatwg] Request for feedback: supported elements for formatBlock

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
> > WebKit's FormatBlock basically supports all HTML5 elements that are
> display: block by default.
>
> Well, not really.  It doesn't support body, ol, or listing, for
> instance.  It does support many more than any other browser does, and
> I don't think this is useful.
>

The problem is with queryCommandValue.  One of the reasons we support so
many block elements is so that queryCommandValue returns a sensible value.
 For example, if called queryCommandValue('FormatBlock') inside a
blockquote, I'd expect to get blockquote back, not an empty string.

I don't think any of this justifies adding blockquote, which is not
> supported by all browsers and whose *usual* use is to contain multiple
> blocks of content.
>

I'm still skeptical that no web content depends on blockquote being
supported by FormatBlock on WebKit.  You might argue that they'll have to
modify anyway due to IE not supporting it but most of editors do feature /
browser detection and heavily rely on their current behavior.  And WebKit is
also a part of Mac OS X framework and native applications that use WebKit as
a part of their applications have no incentive to support Trident, Gecko, or
Opera behaviors.

(I had to get the id by inspecting the DOM; I think it varies.)  Gmail
> uses the indent and outdent commands for blockquote.  Which makes
> sense, since everyone supports those, and IE doesn't support
> formatBlock with blockquote.  My proposal is to converge on the
> intersection of what all browsers currently support (plus possibly
> dd/dt, which only Opera doesn't support).
>

Okay, I'm fine with that.  But I'm still not convinced that WebKit should
drop the support for other elements because there is virtually no benefit in
dropping the support other than the fact we'll conform to the spec.

In general, I'm not convinced that all browsers should support the exact set
of elements for FormatBlock.  Having the set of elements supported by all
browsers seems to suffice.

- Ryosuke