[webkit-dev] Fwd: webkit editing rewrite?

[Darin Adler]

On Aug 4, 2010, at 3:48 PM, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:

> I think the kind of crashes Ojan is talking about are ones caused by DOM mutation events.  When we're in a middle of a composite event and fire a DOMModified or whatever appropriate mutation event is, JavaScript can come in and remove node, delete the entire document, or some other crazy things.  To avoid this, we have to consider all possible ways in which DOM can be modified.  This is really hard to do, and implementing some of editing commands in JavaScript will at least stop us from crashing although it'll probably end in some unexpected behavior.  But I'd suspect unexpected behavior is better than crashing for most of users.

It’s possible we’ll address this by changing how DOM mutation events work.

It’s true that in JavaScript you can’t use a raw pointer by accident, since all pointers to the DOM are automatically RefPtr.

> To put it another way, our not being able to implement the existing editing commands using the public APIs indicates that we're not providing good set of APIs now.

Designing and creating a new lower level set of editing functions that you could build higher level commands on top of them seems like a worthwhile thing to do. I’m hoping that our existing editing code provides some clues about what we’d need. I’d love to see some specific proposals.

    -- Darin