[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 57148] Delete table in contentEditable/designMode produces odd contents

Thu May 26 13:07:23 PDT 2011

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57148

--- Comment #21 from Annie Sullivan <sullivan at chromium.org>  2011-05-26 13:07:23 PST ---
(In reply to comment #20)
> I think it’s fine to adjust this list of properties. If it has to do with editing, we may want to move that list somewhere else.
> 
> I don’t understand the ramification of removing these specific properties. I think that generally if you are using a particular editing user interface, the properties you don’t want to copy are the ones that have no UI to adjust them. Hence, any code inside WebKit has to make a lot of assumptions about UI. That’s not great, and worth thinking over.

In this case, we're copying the table border properties when we delete a table cell. As you can see in the layout test results, there are two cases here:

1. The table border properties get left over in a styled span when the entire table is deleted. This is the case in the original bug report, and it doesn't make any sense to have table border CSS when there is no longer any table.

2. The table border properties get copied into a styled span around the contents of a deleted cell when it gets merged into another cell. The cell that the contents were merged into has its own border properties, and the user most likely intended that those border properties be used.

> 
> Google Docs might have one set of properties it can adjust in Chrome. Some other properties might be adjustable only in Safari because it has different menu items. And then uses outside the web such as Mail might have yet another set of properties. I’m concerned about trying to use a single list for all of these.

I agree this is really painful. I used to work on Google Docs, and it was really frustrating because there was no way to determine what styles would be included, or how they would be included. Writing a good rich text editor app involves an enormous amount of cleanup around things like this. But I don't think there's a good way to solve this problem in the general case without getting some agreement around a specification--e.g. how to specify the list across browsers. A spec is being worked on, but I'm sure it will take quite some time to get it down to this level of detail. In the meantime, copying the table borders is adding a lot of cruft and this affects TinyMCE, which is a very popular rich text editor used by a lot of sites.

-- 
Configure bugmail: https://bugs.webkit.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug.