[webkit-dev] Supporting css ime-mode property

[James Su]

Though this property is useful in some situation, it's very confusing
regarding to its real purpose. If I understand correctly, this property is
mostly used for restricting the input character set of an input box. But an
IME is actually only one of many ways can be used by the user to input
Unicode characters, so only enabling/disabling the IME actually doesn't
solve the underlying problem. If we really want to provide the ability of
restricting the input character set, I'd rather suggest to add an attribute
to the input element explicitly for this purpose, and make it into the
standard. If we just want to provide compatibility to IE, adding "ime-mode"
would be ok, but we may want to warn web developers about the limitations
and problems of this property explicitly.

Regards
James Su

2010/10/4 Kenichi Ishibashi <bashi at google.com>

> Hi,
>
> I'd like to implement CSS ime-mode property, which
> activates/deactivates input methods, to WebKit. Here is the MDC's
> document about this property:
>
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/ime-mode
>
> This property is not a part of any public standard, but both of IE and
> Firefox support this property. Like Safari and Chrome, they are widely
> used browsers so the ime-mode property is frequently used when one
> wants to control input methods. So, if WebKit supports this property,
> it would improve compatibility of web pages and make web developers
> easier to implement their pages and services.
>
> I recently posted a patch to support the ime-mode property for mac
> (See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21279), but alexey asked
> me to discuss at WHATWG mailing list whether we really should
> implement this property. Before going to WATWG, I'd like to ask
> opinions from webkit-dev mailing list.
>
> In comments of https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21279, I
> mentioned the motivation and benefits of supporting this property. In
> sammary, there are pros and cons for supporting the ime-mode property.
>
> Pros:
> - Can provide a suitable input mode of input methods for particular
> input elements. For instance, one might deactivate the input method on
> a credit card number form or telephone number form, while might
> activate th input method on a address form.
> - Improves page compatibility. As I mentioned in the comment of the
> issue, there are many pages which uses the ime-mode property,
> espacially in CJK web pages. Providing the same behavior regardless of
> what browser the use uses would be helpful both web authors and users.
>
> Cons:
> - Some users not always feel good when the browser controls input
> methods automatically.
> - Input validation is still needed even if this property is specified
> on an input element and the user input are restricted.
>
> FYI, discussion on implementing ime-mode property in Firefox is also
> available at:
>
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279246.
>
> As the MDC document noted, it's not appropriate for excessive use of
> this property, but, IMHO, supporting this property would be helpful
> for people who musta take care of input method related stuff.
>
> Regards,
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> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
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>
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