Lachlan Hunt wrote:
How is that any different from a text area form control with a specified accept type of text/html, which would allow a UA to load any external editor (eg. XStandard) or degrade to a regular text area?
The point of contentEditable is that some areas of a page can be made editable (and editing toggled on and off), while still maintaining the styling and structure of the document. This is really useful for CMS'es and other kind of editors - template editing and so on.
contentEditable is quite clean since you just toggle an attribute. With your proposal, the editable element should toggle between the original content, and a textarea element containing content, now HTML escaped, but still rendered as if it were ordinary content, including inheriting styles and so on from the containing document. That does not seem very clean.
User can edit with plain text editor or UA can load WYSIWYG editor for text/html (or whatever ever MIME type is specified)
But this considers the editable content as just an arbitrary content type which should be edited in some external editor. The point of contentEditable is that the editable content is HTML and an integrated part of the containing page, which enables much cleaner "in place" editing. If you just consider the editable content an arbitrary blob of editable content, you wouldn't e.g. expect styles from the containing document to inherit into the editable HTML, which is a major point of contentEditable. Also consider that editable areas may contain non-editable islands which aganin may contain editable areas. How would that be expresses using TEXTAREA ?
That would be a far better option than using contentEditable, which is not only conceptually broken, but *all* implementations of it are so incredibly broken, that trying to standardise it is like dragging a dead horse through mud.
Certainly the IE implementation (which is the only non-beta implementation i know of) has its issues, but I dont see how its "conceptually broken". Its very useful, despite its shortcomings.
regards Olav Junker Kjær
