[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 21279] Support ime-mode (CSS property)

Tue Sep 7 18:11:35 PDT 2010

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21279

--- Comment #14 from Kenichi Ishibashi <bashi at google.com>  2010-09-07 18:11:35 PST ---
(In reply to comment #13)

Hi Alexey,

Thank you for your comments.

> Are you aware of any Web sites that are misbehaving due to our lack of support for ime-mode?

Here is a web page that uses ime-mode property (it's written in Japanese, sorry for your inconvenience):

https://www.aeoncredit.co.jp/NetBranch/cardinit.do

This page is the registration form for becoming a member of a credit card club. Most of input elements in this page are styled with ime-mode property because the system requires users to provide information with certain format. For instance, name of the user must contain only Katakana (it is quite common to force providing one's name with Katakana or Hiragana in Japan to identify how to read his/her name). On the other hand, the card number and the phone number must provide as ASCII characters (I think it's not appropriate because they can automatically convert non-ASCII digits characters to ASCII digits characters, but unfortunately such restriction is also commonly used in Japanese pages).

> You are saying that this is a common issue in Japan. Could you please provide some examples? It doesn't seem i18n-friendly to provide a way to special case ASCII, and only ASCII. In fact, I can't think of many examples where text should be ASCII-only. Even when typing code in some programming language, there can be non-ASCII string literals, at least.

I think above page is could be an example. Please note that ime-mode property not only for to force disabling input methods. IMHO, ime-mode property should be used for providing suitable input mode by default, rather than forcing enabling/disabling input methods. We can provide suitable default input mode by using 'ime-mode: active' or 'ime-mode: inactive' and even if these style are specified, the user can turn on/off the input method whenever the user want.

In addition, there are many demands on controlling input methods can be seen on the web. I've searched with query "html 入力制限" (means "html input restrict") and got about 2,800,000 results, and most of search results on the first page are related with controlling input methods.

> If the actual use case is switching to a numeric input mode in mobile devices, then it doesn't seem like we should be making any changes on desktop. And why forcefully disable Russian keyboard? It's perfectly good for phone numbers.

Sorry for leading to misunderstanding, but mobile devices is one of an example. As mentioned above, there are also demands on desktop web applications.

> In HTML5, there is <input type=tel>, and a mobile browser should be able to recognize that, and set input mode accordingly if needed.

<input type="tel"> is very useful, but it's not a substitute of ime-mode property because ime-mode not only for inputting numbers.

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