[whatwg] Should editable elements have placeholder attribute?

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Note that this shouldn't be hard to do without magic.  Just something
> like this in the UA style sheet:
>
> [contenteditable]:empty { min-height: 1em; }

contenteditable is not a boolean attribute -- you'd need to do
[contenteditable=true].  But I don't think that works right if there's
leading or trailing whitespace or similar.  In theory, this might do
the trick:

  :read-only > :read-write { min-height: 1em; }

except that WebKit doesn't let editability affect
:read-only/:read-write, because it uses a CSS property to track
editability.  (Gecko uses a per-node boolean flag and just iterates
through ancestors when necessary.)

Also, :empty won't help if there's a child that's only whitespace, like

  <div contenteditable>
  </div>

or

  <div contenteditable> </div>

which would be a case we'd want to handle.  But if you omit the
:empty, it would break if there were smaller-than-usual text.

Also, 1em isn't the same as if you put some text in it.  Generally,
typing some text is supposed to create a <p>, which might make it
substantially taller than 1em depending on margin collapsing, right?
You'd know this better than me.

So I don't think this would be so trivial to spec.  If you can come up
with something that works, I'm all ears!

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 6:53 PM, Ojan Vafai <ojan at chromium.org> wrote:
> While WebKit does put the magic <br> in, that's not what avoids the
> collapsing in this case. If you set the innerHTML to "", it still doesn't
> collapse. We actually hard-code that editing hosts don't collapse.

I know -- this is the non-standard special case I referred to.  :)
This is technically not per spec at present, but I wouldn't object to
standardizing it if it can be done reasonably.  The only thing is, I'm
not sure it can be.  I'm not convinced that hardcoding editing logic
into CSS is a good idea unless it's needed for web compat, which I
imagine it's not, because Gecko doesn't do it.

But on the other hand, it looks like everyone but Gecko does do it,
although I'm sure the details are totally different.  And it's
certainly nice for usability.  So it would be nice if we had some good
way to spec it.  I wonder if Opera does it in a saner-to-spec way.