On May 27, 2014, at 1:33 AM, Robin Berjon <ro...@w3.org> wrote: > On 27/05/2014 01:47 , Ben Peters wrote: >>> -----Original Message----- From: Robin Berjon >>> On 26/05/2014 05:43 , Norbert Lindenberg wrote: >>>> Were any speakers of bidirectional languages in the room when >>>> this was discussed? >>> >>> I don't know what languages the others speak. That said, my >>> recollection was that this was presented along the lines of "we've >>> had regular requests to support selecting text in geometric rather >>> than logical orders". >> >> I have also heard these requests from the bi-directional experts here >> at Microsoft. A single, unbroken selection is what we're told users >> want, and multi-selection makes this possible. > > Thinking about this a little bit more: I don't imagine that the Selection API > should prescribe the UI that browsers choose to support in order to select > bidi text, on the contrary they should be allowed to innovate, experiment, > follow various platform conventions, etc. But if we don't support multi-range > selection, then only one model is possible which precludes unbroken > selections. > > I think that this strongly pushes in the direction of supporting multiple > ranges.
I agree visual selection of bidirectional text is a problem worth solving but I don't think adding a generic multi-range selection support to the degree Gecko does is the right solution. For starters, most of author scripts completely ignore all but the first range, and applying editing operations to a multi-range selection is a nightmare. - R. Niwa
