On Apr 6, 2010, at 9:29 AM, Alexey Proskuryakov wrote:
> 05.04.2010, в 22:46, Maciej Stachowiak написал(а):
>
>>> The current implementation allows for (and operates on) positions such as
>>> [img, 0] - [img, 1] or [br,0] - [br, 1]. Is there a fundamental reason to
>>> keep such positions within the internal representation rather than
>>> normalize them to [parent-of-img, index-of-img(+1)] - round-tripping
>>> perhaps?
>>
>> Having fake positions like that is not good. I don't think there is a good
>> reason for it. But the assumption got deeply embedded into the code, and it
>> will take some doing to remove. One step in that direction would be to phase
>> out all use of Position.deprecatedEditingOffset() and Position.node().
>
> I think that one reason is performance - "index-of-img" can be costly. But I
> completely agree that we should try to get rid of these.
Let me elaborate on what Maciej and Alexey said.
If we have an <img> element, there are three valid DOM positions adjacent to it:
A: [ parent-of-<img>, child-offset-of-<img> ]: before the image
B: [ <img>, 0 ]: inside the image
C: [ parent-of-<img>, child-offset-of-<img> + 1 ]: after the image
WebKit’s HTML editing code also makes use of an invalid DOM position:
D: [ <img>, 1 ]: inside the image, but used to represent the position after
the image
Using D is never a good idea because it’s not a valid DOM position, so we can’t
use it to construct a DOM range object. Having positions like D in our code at
all leads to complexity and confusion.
Using B to represent the position before the image is also unconventional; the
position is clearly “inside the image element”, whatever that means. Given
that, it seems that editing-related code that starts with a position such as B
should quickly convert it to either A or C as appropriate.
But computing A or C given a pointer to an image element is costly because it
involves walking the parent's child nodes. In a large, flat document the cost
is proportional to the size of the document. The same goes if we start with A
or C and want to find the image element just before or just after the position.
There are other issues when the document is being changed with positions
extant. If we add a child element to the <img> element’s parent before the
<img> element, both A and C end up pointing to a different place in the
document, but B and D will still point where they did before. So if we convert
editing code that currently uses a position like B to instead use a position
like A, it’s easy to change behavior without realizing it.
Encapsulating some of this into a class is one of the goals of the Position
object, but we haven’t made much progress on untangling the mess.
-- Darin
_______________________________________________
webkit-dev mailing list
webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
