Simon Pieters wrote:
Note: Personal comment, not a WG response.
On Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:59:50 +0200, <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello,
I was looking at behavior differences between browsers and the spec
regarding document.designMode.
The way the attribute is defined in the spec makes it just another way
to formulate contentEditable for the document. With such a definition,
it seems overkill to have it since there are already 2 more generic
ways to express the same thing: contentEditable and CSS's user-modify.
The implementation differs from the specification in the sense that
you cannot override the designMode by a child with contentEditable. See:
-https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22036
-https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462735
According to its documentation, the way designMode works on Internet
Explorer is yet another behavior:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533720%28VS.85%29.aspx
With my current understanding of the problem, I think this should be
removed from the specification or explicitly deprecated. The
differences between released browser make the attribute unreliable for
web authors. I could not find in the archives why designMode was added
to the spec, I would be interested to the rationale behind this feature.
designMode is needed for Web compat. If the spec doesn't match browsers,
please file spec bugs.
.. and on this topic, I was thinking last night that if the browsers
were to implement or make available a way for end users to turn design
mode on (say a context menu option, or a small button), then this
feature may naturally become far more used and spur on quite a bit of
innovation on the content editing front.
additionally, it would be nice if there was a clear way to mark parts of
a document as potentially editable, such that when that designMode was
entered in to, only certain parts of the document became editable - this
I feel would be a *really* useful feature.
background: I've been using contentEditable & designMode on HTML and
text documents for a while, in particular I cooked up 6 or 7
bookmarklets which turn design mode on, and also do basic webdav
operations to create new files, put/save/update, delete and so forth,
hooked them up to a webdav enabled endpoint over https with client cert
authentication, and have found it a huge time saver and incredibly nice
to use.
Best,
Nathan
