Dan,
Do you really need to customize these things through the editing
delegate, or do you just need WebKit to fix them in its own editing
code? Most of your comments suggest that the latter is the case.
Geoff
On Dec 21, 2006, at 11:14 AM, Dan Wood wrote:
Hi folks,
I've been working with the webkit editing APIs for well over a year
now, and I've long had some frustrations with the quality of the
HTML markup that is produced when one edits a block of text with
webkit.
I've mentioned this over the months to various webkats and
webkittens, but I haven't really gotten anywhere with it, so I
thought I would post my thoughts here and see if I can get some
discussion going, and maybe we all can draw up a spec on how to
improve WebKit.
I have a number of concerns about the HTML markup that I'd lke to
address:
* Being able to control/prevent insertion of apple-only and/or
webkit-only tags and styles
* Being able to control/prevent certain kinds of tags and style
tags from being inserted, to keep markup simpler and perhaps
prevent certain adjustments like changing fonts/colors
* Having control over how "physical" attributes (like boldface) get
marked up (e.g. <b> or <strong> or <div style="font-weight:bold;">)
* Better normalization of tags so you never get two identical,
adjacent style spans; they would be coalesced into one.
* Semi-intelligent mapping of "physical" attributes to predefined
styles classes
* Better use of CSS short-hand, e.g. use the "font:" property
instead of font-family and font-size
* Be able to specify how plain text is dealt with when it's pasted
in; is it blocked within <pre> tags, separated by <br/> tags, or
each line enclosed in <div> tags.
As a launching point, I wanted to point out some existing APIs in
NSAttributedString, namely -[NSAttributedString
dataFromRange:documentAttributes:error:]. You can pass in
NSHTMLTextDocumentType to convert an attributed string to HTML, and
you can then pass in NSExcludedElementsDocumentAttribute, described
as "An NSArray object containing NSString objects, representing
HTML elements not to be used in generated HTML." These attributes
are documented on this page <http://developer.apple.com/
releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html>.
WebKit actually uses this technique in -[WebHTMLView
_documentFragmentFromPasteboard:...], for what it's worth.
I think that ideally how this would best work would be a method or
some methods in the editing delegate, where you could specify the
kind of markup that is allowed and specify other options. This
would, of course, affect the actual editing behavior while editing
happens, e.g. if you were to exclude the special apple/webkit tags
that provide fine control over the text (such as allowing multiple
spaces), then the text would reflect that while editing.
Comments?
--
Dan Wood
Karelia Software — Sandvox for the Mac
http://www.karelia.com/
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. —
George Bernard Shaw
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