[webkit-dev] Disjointed selection ranges

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Glenn Adams <glenn at skynav.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:51 AM, Shezan Baig <shezbaig.wk at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>> We are using embedded WebKit in our application, and we need to be
>>> able to use disjointed selection ranges for table editing.  I was
>>> wondering whether anybody is currently working on implementing this,
>>> and is there any bug number for it?  If not, I will attempt to
>>> implement it based on the approach described by Eric in [1] and [2].
>>>
>>
>> I don't think we should implement general multi-range selection. It
>> causes all sorts of hell in editing.
>>
>
> keep in mind that you need this or something much like it to handle
> correct selection in some complex scripts (e.g., indic scripts) as well as
> bidi contexts
>

What do you mean by "correct"? Selection in bidirectional text follow
logical order on all major browsers although Gecko supports a non-default
option to use visual-order selection. I've talked with many native RTL
speakers who have a lot of experience working with bidirectional text but
they almost unanimously agreed that selecting text in visual order is a bad
idea. Also, when you copy the text selected by visual order and pasting it
to somewhere else, we need to somehow serialize the text and the algorithm
by which to do this is not well defined.

- Ryosuke
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20120814/441d35fd/attachment.html>