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
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. — George Bernard Shaw
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