On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:22 AM, Adam Barth <abarth@webkit.org> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 1:59 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> If mutation events tend to break editing, one simple solution is to turn then off within the scope of editing operations and send a single mutation event at the end. It's not clear if that kind of solution would be appropriate to expose to Web content, though; you can't do the RAII idiom in JavaScript so there could be too much risk of staying stuck in the "mutation events deferred" state. On the other hand, a dynamic-wind-style solution might be appropriate. This is one tiny example of how the same abstractions might not be right internally and externally.

If we don't already have it, we definitely want a RAII for turning off
mutation events (or at least ASSERTing that we're not trying to fire
them) for the parser.  The new and old tree builders might explode if
they ever fire a mutation event.

I'm trying to figure out what we should do with DOM Mutation Events. The general agreement from the www-dom discussion of mutation events was that they are the wrong abstraction for editing related code. beforeinput/input events meet editing needs better. So, that leaves a small list of relatively low-priority use-cases. See http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/MutationReplacement for some of them.

Mutation events are a huge source of crashes and they complicate WebCore code considerably. Also, I don't see any evidence that mutation events are used much other than as a blunt dirty bit for editing code, which can now be replaced with the input event. Here's some options I see:
  1. Make the existing mutation events them async. That would address all the issues with them except for the performance cost and would only be backwards-incompatible for the small percentage of sites that depend on the events firing synchronously.
  2. Drop support for them with no replacement.
  3. Complete the implementation of beforeinput/input events to support editing use-cases then do 1 or 2.
  4. Same as above, but also implement a low-level replacement for mutation events (e.g. something like http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2009AprJun/0081.html).
Do any of these options sound feasible or is the only option to do the very large amount of work to make existing mutation events work?

Ojan