[whatwg] Should editable elements have placeholder attribute?

[David Young]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 10:11:26PM +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Wed, 2 May 2012, Alfonso Mart?nez de Lizarrondo wrote:
> > 
> > Recently I wrote such a plugin for CKEditor, it can be tested here: 
> > http://alfonsoml.blogspot.com.es/2012/04/placeholder-text-in-ckeditor.html 
> > I don't think that too many people request this feature, but that might 
> > be simply because there are other bigger problems and they don't want to 
> > waste the time with these details :-)
> > 
> > In my checks to see if the editor is empty I decided that empty means no 
> > real content, only a paragraph or new line, and of course every browser 
> > decided that clearing the content might mean a different default content 
> > In the end this is the check that I'm using at the moment (I didn't 
> > perform extensive tests, just enough to check that it seemed to work)
> > 
> > var value = data.replace( /[\n|\t]*/g, '' ).toLowerCase();
> > if ( !value || value == '<br>' || value == '<p> <br></p>' || value ==
> > '<p><br></p>' || value == '<p> </p>' )
> >     return true;
> 
> Now there's a problem we should fix. Having five different representations 
> of "nothing" seems like a terrible position for us to be in.

How many cursor positions are there in each of those strings?  I think
that if there is more than one possible cursor position, then the state
of the editor is "some content" instead of "no content."

I submit that only the empty string (value == '') is "no content". :-)

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung at pobox.com    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981