[webkit-dev] Fwd: webkit editing rewrite?

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Aug 4, 2010, at 6:12 PM, Ojan Vafai wrote:

> 
> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Geoffrey Garen <ggaren at apple.com> wrote:
>>> -Ensures that the APIs we expose to the web are at least good enough for our own editing code
>> 
>> I don't think this necessarily follows. Not everything exposed to the internal editing implementation would necessarily be exposed to the web. If we required that everything exposed to the internal editing implementation be exposed to the web, that would substantially slow development, since every new API would need to be vetted and possibly standardized. So this is either not true or a substantial con.
> 
> This would have been a fine point without the last sentence here. I'm
> not sure how to read that sentence without the implication that I'm
> either being stupid or manipulative. FWIW, I do think that everything
> exposed to the internal editing implementation should eventually be
> exposed to the web. I'll expand on that below.

I think Geoff is not saying that you are stupid or manipulative, just that he disagrees with your conclusion. There are many reasons someone could be wrong, for example that they are honestly mistaken. When I think someone is wrong, I usually assume they are honestly mistaken  and can probably be persuaded through logic. Or else, perhaps I am mistaken and will learn that through discussion. When someone else disagrees with me and says I am wrong, I try to assume they thought I made an honest mistake. Sometimes people actually do think I am stupid or are stupid themselves, but I find it makes technical discussions go better if I don't focus on those possibilities.

Short version: let's all try to assume good faith on the part of our fellow webkit-dev posters.

(That being said, I think a few parts of Geoff's message were a little too snarky, but I think the point you cited here is a reasonable one and not stated in an overly combative way.)

> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:
>> Inventing a new layer to rebuild editing on top could well be good. Exposing that layer itself to webpages seems like it makes the job even harder rather than easier! Hidden implementation details can be changed more easily than exposed APIs.
> 
> I agree that these can be separated out. 1 and 2 are the ones I really
> care about. 3 and 4 were just an idea of one way to get there. I'm not
> attached to them.
> 
> I was picturing that we would first implement all or most of our
> editing code on top of the editing API and then, once we were
> confident with it, expose it as a webkit prefixed set of APIs that we
> propose to the appropriate standards body. I'd like to see an approach
> to this where we move (incrementally) in the direction of a clearly
> defined editing API that the editing code uses that we can eventually
> expose to the web.
> 
> I'll try and make some concrete proposals in the coming days.

I think this carries an assumption that the right internal abstractions are necessarily also a sensible public API. I don't know if that is a good assumption. 

First: It is tempting to argue along the lines of "the pieces needed to implement API X must be powerful primitives which should be exposed as API in their own right". But at some level, there has to be a next layer of implementation down that is not exposed, so clearly this line of argument has limits. It can't be API turtles all the way down.

Second, often the right internal implementation strategy bears very little relation to the proper public API. For example, CSS is a reasonable constraint-based system to express layout and style rules. Web designers seem to get along ok with it. But internally it's implemented via the render tree, which is a very different abstraction, though it relates to CSS concepts. Exposing the render tree in every detail would greatly constrain our ability to change implementation strategy in the future. So this is one clear-cut case where the implementation abstractions do not necessarily make sense as API. To give a simpler and more pervasive example, we use refcounting throughout many pieces of WebCore, but it would not be appropriate to expose to Web content because it's too low-level. I could cite endless examples where the public API exposed to Web content ends up very different from internal abstractions. The DOM is probably the one major subsystem where there is a lot of similarity, and even then, many critical implementation interfaces are not exposed, nor should they be.

Third, in the case of editing specifically, much of the existing behavior, in response to user actions and things like the execCommand API, has *really* weird quirks. And some of its behavior is probably wrong in light of what other browsers do. It may be that the pieces needed to build all those quirky behaviors are not really sane as a public API.

Overall, I think the API design process should work in the opposite direction. You don't start by building internal abstractions and then promoting them to API. You start with the API, either one that is required by standards/legacy, or one that is designed to make sense for content authors. Then you design the right architecture and internal interfaces to implement that API correctly and efficiently. If the two end up resembling each other, that is a helpful coincidence, but it's likely that they will not.

I think creating better abstractions to implement the legacy editing API on the one hand, and creating a better public editing API for Web content on the other, are both quite difficult problems. If you assume that they must be solved with a single solution, that's probably overconstraining the problem space.

> 
> On Aug 4, 2010 4:30:01 PM PDT, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
> <snip>
>> It’s possible we’ll address this by changing how DOM mutation events
>> work.
> 
> We need to change how DOM mutation events work regardless of this
> proposal IMO. So, lets keep that a separate discussion.

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.

Regards,
Maciej