The features documented herein are obsolete. Authors should not use these features directly, but instead use JavaScript editing libraries. The features described in this document are not implemented consistently or fully by user agents, and it is not expected that this will change in the foreseeable future.
This document aims to assist web browser implementers in correctly handling old websites, but implementers should be aware that it is incomplete and does not match any implementation exactly, so it is unlikely to process sites correctly as-is. Nevertheless it remains available in case the research that went into it proves useful to implementers.
Because of lack of implementer interest, this document is no longer maintained. However, the accompanying conformance tests are useful for regression-testing changes to existing editor implementations, even if those implementations do not intend to match the specification exactly.
The selections portion of this specification has been superseded by the Selection API specification. It remains here as well only to avoid the need to rewrite the editing portions of this specification to refer to the new specification.
This document is a rough draft of a specification for HTML editing APIs,
mainly defining selections, execCommand()
and related
functionality. It replaces a couple of old sections of the HTML specification, and the selection
part of the old DOM Range specification.
Copyright © 2015 the Contributors to the HTML Editing APIs Specification, published by the W3C Editing APIs Community Group under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA). A human-readable summary is available.
This specification, along with the accompanying JavaScript implementation and tests, may also be used under the terms of the CC0 1.0 Universal License. Thus anyone may reuse, modify, and redistribute them without restriction.
This specification was published by the W3C Editing APIs Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track. Please note that under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA) there is a limited opt-out and other conditions apply. Learn more about W3C Community and Business Groups.
backColor
commandbold
commandcreateLink
commandfontName
commandfontSize
commandforeColor
commandhiliteColor
commanditalic
commandremoveFormat
commandstrikethrough
commandsubscript
commandsuperscript
commandunderline
commandunlink
commanddelete
commandformatBlock
commandforwardDelete
commandindent
commandinsertHorizontalRule
commandinsertHTML
commandinsertImage
commandinsertLineBreak
commandinsertOrderedList
commandinsertParagraph
commandinsertText
commandinsertUnorderedList
commandjustifyCenter
commandjustifyFull
commandjustifyLeft
commandjustifyRight
commandoutdent
commandA piece of software that claims to implement this specification must follow every normative requirement in it. Every requirement in this specification is normative unless stated otherwise.
These are comments. All comments other than this one are non-normative.
This is a note. All notes other than this one are non-normative.
This is an open issue. All issues other than this one are non-normative.
The remainder of this section is not normative, and nor is any preceding section.
This specification defines commands to edit HTML documents programmatically. The APIs specified here were originally introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but have subsequently been copied by other browsers in a haphazard and imprecise fashion. Although the behavior specified here does not exactly match any browser at the time of writing, it can serve as a target to converge to in the future.
Where the reasoning behind the specification is of interest, such as when major preexisting rendering engines are known not to match it, the reasoning is available by clicking the "comments" button on the right (requires JavaScript). If you have questions about why the specification says something, check the comments first. They're sometimes longer than the specification text itself, and commonly record what the major browsers do and other essential information.
The principles I've used for writing this specification so far are:
strong
and em
.) Of
course, in some cases we have to remove elements, like when merging two
blocks.
for bold
(if the CSS styling flag is false), and convert
and
if we happen to be modifying
that node anyway.
This section is not normative.
There are two groups of tests currently associated with this document: selection tests, and command tests. These tests are a non-normative part of this specification. The command tests are available in two formats, development tests and conformance tests. This has a lot to do with the history of how the specification was developed: selection was originally part of the defunct DOM Range spec, while the command parts were developed on their own. The selection things have been merged into the command spec, but neither the spec text nor the tests have been fully unified at the time of this writing.
Thus the selection tests live in their own directory, selecttest/. They use the standard testharness.js framework developed by James Graham. They're entirely self-contained, sharing nothing with the command tests (except invoking the testharness.js library). At the time of this writing, they're not nearly as comprehensive as the command tests, although they do test some functionality comprehensively.
On the other hand, the command-related part of this specification is developed in tandem with a more or less complete JavaScript implementation. The implementation is used for creating tests, of two different types: development tests and conformance tests. The two types of test share most of the same code, starting with the multi-thousand-line implementation itself. The actual tests run are largely the same in either case, but the way they're run is very different.
The development tests were the original ones, and were designed to assist in writing the specification from scratch. Given an input, they print out the spec's and browser's output to allow manual inspection. They can store the spec's output and will raise an alert if it changed since the last run, as a form of regression testing, but they don't print out counts of passed/failed tests. They are not designed to run exactly the same across browsers and are tolerant of minor variations. Development tests are likely not very useful for anyone other than the spec's editor.
Conformance tests were added later. They run the same tests as the development tests, but in an entirely non-interactive format, using the testharness.js framework like the selection tests. They always run the same set of tests, don't vary behavior between browsers (hopefully), and are unforgiving of any deviation. However, they're significantly more cumbersome to set up and use, so they're less useful for developing the specification itself.
There's a suite of predefined tests for each command (~30–300 at the time of this writing). These are the only tests run for the conformance tests, and in the regression tests they can be run by clicking the "Run tests" button. For the regression tests, you can also enter your own tests manually in the box provided. In any event, the test input is a snippet of HTML, which must have a selection marked in it. There are three ways to mark a selection's start or end:
foo[bar]baz
for a selection whose start and end nodes are in
the text node foobarbaz
, with start offset 3 and end offset 6. Do
not use square brackets where there's no text node: []
is
bad, {}
is correct.
{foobarbaz}
for a selection whose start node is the element
, whose start offset is 0, whose end node is the root of the
editable region, and whose end offset is 1. Do not use curly braces in the
middle of a text node: foo{bar}baz
is bad, foo[bar]baz
is correct.
data-start
and data-end
attributes mark a selection inside an element if a curly brace can't be put
there in text/html. For instance,
{foo }
doesn't work because when the
fragment is parsed, the curly braces end up outside the table. Instead, you
have to do foo
.
Every input must have exactly one start marker and one end marker, which
will be removed from the DOM before the test is run. You can mix and match
marker types, e.g., [foo}
.
There is one special test type that behaves differently, "multitest". This allows running several tests in succession, which is needed at least for testing the effect of commands' state override or value override. The syntax is JSON, and looks like
[HTML input, [command name 1, command value 1], [command name 2, command value 2], . . .]
where all the variables are properly-quoted JSON strings. queryCommand*()
are not run for multitests.
In all cases, prefixing the test string (or the first string in the test array, for arrays) with "!" has a special effect. The "!" will be stripped, and the test will be added to an array of bad tests. These tests will be omitted from the conformance tests. This is used to mark tests where the reference implementation is known to currently give bad results, either because of a bug in the reference implementation or a bug in the spec. Bad tests will still be run as development tests.
Commands that are expected to vary significantly based on the value of the
CSS styling flag are run twice. The first time runs
execCommand("styleWithCSS", false, "false")
before every
command, and the second runs execCommand("styleWithCSS", false,
"true")
before every command. All other commands other than multitests
run execCommand("styleWithCSS", false, "false")
before every
command. The extra tests are not run as regression tests, in IE or Opera,
because they don't implement the styleWithCSS
command (but of course the conformance tests always all run).
The implementation is also used for an actual rich-text editor, but it's currently more of a toy than anything. Significant functionality is probably broken, especially outside of Gecko/WebKit. I might spend some more time getting it to work right, but it's certainly not going to be very useful on real-world sites, since there's no way any of this stuff will work in IE8.
The development tests are mostly useful for developing the spec itself, not for use by authors or browser implementers. They consist of a suite of fully automated tests plus a few separate suites of manual tests. The tests are:
delete
command.
forwardDelete
command.
insertLineBreak
command.
insertParagraph
command.
insertText
command, with value
"a".
insertText
command, with value
" ".
The automated tests run the JavaScript implementation of the specification
on a particular input, then run the browser's implementation on the same input
for comparison. The results of running automated tests are placed in a table,
with rows marked as passing or failing based on whether the browser output is
"close enough" to the spec output. Since the tests are designed for debugging
the spec rather than actually testing conformance, minor variations are allowed
to avoid having browsers fail many tests for uninteresting reasons. Passes and
fails are based only on execCommand()
output, not queryCommand*()
: the latter is sanity-checked, and colored green
or red if it's known to be right or wrong on general principle, but spec and
browser output are not compared.
The tests will optionally store the specification's result for each test in
localStorage
, and will raise an alert for any new test (no
stored output), any test whose spec output is different from the last run, and
any test whose spec output is otherwise clearly bad (e.g., producing a
non-serializable DOM). This is mostly useful for debugging and
regression-testing the spec itself, and is probably not interesting to anyone
other than me.
When a test runs, first the code sets up a contenteditable div with the
given contents and sets the selection as requested. Then it runs
queryCommandIndeterm()
, queryCommandState()
, and
queryCommandValue()
, and their values are noted. Then it runs
execCommand()
. Finally, it runs
queryCommandIndeterm()
, queryCommandState()
, and
queryCommandValue()
again. Then it adds the output to the table.
The manual tests are much like the automated tests, with some key
differences. They only test one command each, with one input value (if
applicable). When a test is run, everything proceeds as in the automated case,
but instead of running execCommand()
for the browser tests, the
user is asked to hit the appropriate key (backspace, delete, enter, etc.).
Thus when running the tests for the first time, the user has to hit a key
repeatedly, perhaps a few hundred times. The browser's result is then cached
in localStorage
so no manual intervention is required on
subsequent runs except for newly-added tests, but the cached entries can be
cleared if necessary.
The development tests have been tested and largely work in the latest versions (at the time of this writing) of IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. Since the implementation of the spec is in JavaScript, it's vulnerable to bugs in browsers' JavaScript implementations. I work around or warn about some of these, but not all. The most correct results will probably be in Firefox or Chrome: both IE and Opera have serious known bugs that corrupt spec output for many tests. The tests are still useful for reviewing the browser output, but spec output in those browsers should be sanity-checked and compared against another browser's spec output in case of doubt.
The conformance tests operate more like one would expect from tests. Once generated, they consist of a single page, conformancetest/runtest.html, which runs all the tests and prints out a table of passes and fails. Like many other recent web standards suites, they use the testharness.js framework, and browser implementers should be able to make them part of their automated regression test frameworks.
For manual inspection, a version of the conformance tests is also available that runs only some of the tests at once: conformancetest/splitruntest.html. This runs only one group of tests at a time, which takes only a few seconds instead of a minute or more. This makes debugging particular tests much faster. In all other respects, it should behave identically to runtest.html.
Unlike the development tests, the conformance tests don't run the JavaScript implementation as part of the test. Instead, the tests' expected values are generated by a separate page, conformancetest/gentest.html. That page will output the expected values for all tests in a format to be copied to conformancetest/data.js, where it will be used by runtest.html.
This separation has a few benefits. First of all, it means the conformance
tests take a long time to generate, but run much faster than the
development tests: on the order of one minute instead of five or more.
(Browser implementations of execCommand()
are currently much faster
than the spec's JS reference implementation, it seems.) Second of all, it
means that all browsers are running against the same expected results. Third
of all, the fact that all expected results are saved in a file allows much more
systematic regression testing of the spec and the reference implementation.
Changes in expected results will be recorded in the spec's version history and
can be matched up to changes in the reference implementation or the spec,
instead of being stored transiently in the spec editor's localStorage
and then lost.
There are a couple of disadvantages as well. For one thing, new tests can't
easily be added live, so the conformance tests aren't useful for experimenting
with how implementations work. For another thing, the tests' expected results
can only be generated all at once (not per-command), which takes minutes. A
third issue is that they provide no useful feedback at all about user actions
such as hitting Enter: they tell you what the insertParagraph
command does in the browser, but not
whether it matches up to any user action. Commands like the insertText
command just fail all tests in most browsers.
Thus they don't replace the manual development tests at all. (Manual
conformance tests will eventually be added.)
As might be expected, browsers don't generate exactly the same expected
results from the tests. Clearly incorrect expected results (like a DOM that
doesn't round-trip through text/html) are automatically rejected, with a
printed warning, but some discrepancies remain. At the time of this writing,
Firefox 8.0a2 and Chrome 15 dev generate identical results, except that Firefox
omits one test (due to incorrect
serialization of
) and Chrome gets one test wrong (due to a
style resolution
bug). Thus I generate the tests right now in Firefox, since all its
generated tests are at least correct. IE9 and Opera 11.50 don't yet generate
or run the tests usefully at all in this initial version, but this will be
remedied soon.
Event firing is currently tested in a totally separate file, event.html. In the long term, this will probably be merged into runtest.html so that it's tested more thoroughly.
This section is not normative.
This specification is mostly feature-complete. It's more or less fully implemented in JavaScript, and has been tested on a fairly significant amount of artificial input. It has not been tested on real-world sites that use execCommand(), and has not been thoroughly reviewed by anyone other than me. It should be considered mostly stable and awaiting implementater review and feedback.
Significant known issues that I need feedback on, or otherwise am not planning to fix just yet:
I haven't paid much attention to performance. The algorithms here aren't performance-critical in most cases, but I might have accidentally included some algorithms that are too slow anyway on large pages. Generally I haven't worried about throwing nodes away and recreating them multiple times or things like that, as long as it produces the correct result.
If it would be useful to implementers for me to spend time and spec complexity on avoiding some of the masses of useless operations that are currently required, please say so. All intermediate DOM states are black-box detectable via mutation events or whatever their replacement will be, so implementers theoretically can't optimize most of this stuff too much themselves, but in practice I doubt anyone will rely on the intermediate DOM states much.
br
s are a nightmare. I have tons of hacks all over the place which
are totally wrong, mostly to account for the fact that sometimes br
s do
nothing and we need to treat that case magically. I don't know what a good
way is to fix this. At this point I've mostly gotten the evil concentrated
in the definitions "collapsed line break", "extraneous line break", and
"collapsed block prop", but there's lots of other special-case handling
scattered about. Feedback appreciated. How do browsers handle this?
instead of
, while if it's off, it produces stuff like
instead of
. The issue is that authors might want a mix, like
making the markup as concise as possible while still conforming, and they
can't do that. Changing the flag on a per-command basis doesn't help because
of things like the "restore the values" algorithm, which might create several
different types of style at once and has to use the same styling flag for all
of them. This was discussed back in March in this
thread, along with a number of other things, but at that time I hadn't
written commands that change multiple styles at once, so it seemed feasible
to ask authors to switch styleWithCSS on or off on a per-command basis.
A variety of other issues are also noted in the text, formatted like this. Feedback would be appreciated on all of them.
Things that would be useful to address for the future but aren't important to fix right now are in comments prefixed with "TODO".
IE9 and Firefox 6.0a2 allow arbitrary ranges in the selection, which follows what this spec originally said. However, this leads to unpleasant corner cases that authors, implementers, and spec writers all have to deal with, and they don't make any real sense. Chrome 14 dev and Opera 11.11 aggressively normalize selections, like not letting them lie inside empty elements and things like that, but this is also viewed as a bad idea, because it takes flexibility away from authors.
So I changed the spec to a made-up compromise that allows some simplification but doesn't constrain authors much. See discussion. Basically it would throw exceptions in some places to try to stop the selection from containing a range that had a boundary point other than an Element or Text node, or a boundary point that didn't descend from a Document.
But this meant getRangeAt() had to start returning a copy, not a reference. Also, it would be prone to things failing weirdly in corner cases. Perhaps most significantly, all sorts of problems might arise when DOM mutations transpire, like if a boundary point's node is removed from its parent and the mutation rules would place the new boundary point inside a non-Text/Element node. And finally, the previously-specified behavior had the advantage of matching two major implementations, while the new behavior matched no one. So I changed it back.
See bug 15470. IE9, Firefox 12.0a1, Chrome 17 dev, and Opera Next 12.00 alpha all make the range initially null.
For the stuff about defaultView
, see the comments on
document.getSelection()
.
Every document with a non-null
defaultView
has a unique Selection
object associated with it.
Selection
objects are known as
selections. Each selection is
associated with a single range, which may be null and is initially null.
This one selection must be shared by all the content of the document
(though not by nested documents), including any editing hosts in the
document. Editing hosts that are not
inside a document cannot have a selection.
This is a requirement of the HTML spec. IE9 and Opera Next 12.00 alpha seem to follow it, while Firefox 12.0a1 and Chrome 17 dev seem not to. See test, Mozilla bug, WebKit bug.
A document's selection is a singleton object associated with that
document, so it gets replaced with a new object when Document.open()
is called.
See bug 15470. IE9 and Opera Next 12.00 alpha allow the user to reset the range to null after the fact by clicking somewhere; Firefox 12.0a1 and Chrome 17 dev do not. I follow Gecko/WebKit, because it lessens the chance of getRangeAt(0) throwing.
The user agent should allow the user to change the active document's selection. If the user makes any modification to a selection, the user agent must create a new range with suitable start and end and associate the selection with this new range (not modify the existing range). The user agent must not allow the user to set a selection's range to null if it was not already null.
This matches Firefox 12.0a1, as far as I can tell. Chrome 17 dev and Opera Next 12.00 alpha return copies from getRangeAt(), so the requirement isn't testable for them. IE9 threw weird exceptions in my testing, so I match the only browser I could test.
Once a selection is associated with a given range, it must continue to be associated with that same range until this specification requires otherwise.
For instance, if the DOM changes in a way that changes the
range's boundary points, or a script modifies the boundary points of
the range, the same range object must continue to be associated with
the selection. However, if the user changes the selection or a script
calls addRange()
, the selection
must be associated with a new range object, as required elsewhere in this
specification.
This paragraph is vague. It needs to be replaced by detailed conformance requirements saying exactly what to do for particular keystrokes, like we have for backspace/delete/etc.
If the selection's range is not null and is collapsed
, then
the caret position must be at that range's boundary point. When the
selection is not empty, this specification does not define the caret
position; user agents should follow platform conventions in deciding whether
the caret is at the start of the selection, the end of the selection,
or somewhere else.
This short-changes Mac users. See bug 13909.
Each selection has a direction, either forwards or backwards. If the user creates a selection by indicating first one boundary point of the range and then the other (such as by clicking on one point and dragging to another), and the first indicated boundary point is after the second, then the corresponding selection must initially be backwards. Otherwise, it must be forwards (including if the user didn't create the selection, created it by selecting an entire part of the page using a keyboard shortcut, etc.).
Wouldn't it make more sense if addRange()/removeRange() reset direction?
Selections also have an anchor and a focus. If the selection's range is null, its anchor and focus are both null. If the selection's range is not null and its direction is forwards, its anchor is the range's start, and its focus is the end. Otherwise, its focus is the start and its anchor is the end.
interface Selection { readonly attribute Node? anchorNode; readonly attribute unsigned long anchorOffset; readonly attribute Node? focusNode; readonly attribute unsigned long focusOffset; readonly attribute boolean isCollapsed; void collapse(Node node, unsigned long offset); void collapseToStart(); void collapseToEnd(); void extend(Node node, unsigned long offset); void selectAllChildren(Node node); void deleteFromDocument(); readonly attribute unsigned long rangeCount; Range getRangeAt(unsigned long index); void addRange(Range range); void removeRange(Range range); void removeAllRanges(); stringifier; };
See also nsISelection.idl from Gecko. This spec doesn't have everything from there yet, in particular selectionLanguageChange() and containsNode() are missing. They are missing because I couldn't work out how to define them in terms of Ranges.
Originally, the Selection interface was a Netscape feature. The original implementation was carried on into Gecko (Firefox), and the feature was later implemented independently by other browser engines. The Netscape implementation always allowed multiple ranges in a single selection, for instance so the user could select a column of a table. However, multi-range selections proved to be an unpleasant corner case that web developers didn't know about and even Gecko developers rarely handled correctly. Other browser engines never implemented the feature, and clamped selections to a single range in various incompatible fashions.
This specification follows non-Gecko engines in restricting selections to at
most one range, but the API was still originally designed for selections with
arbitrary numbers of ranges. This explains oddities like the coexistence of
removeRange()
and removeAllRanges()
, and a
getRangeAt()
method that takes an integer argument that must always be
zero.
All of the members of the Selection
interface are defined in
terms of operations on the range object (if any) represented by the object.
These operations can raise exceptions, as defined for the Range
interface; this can therefore result in the
members of the Selection
interface raising exceptions as well, in
addition to any explicitly called out below.
What happens if you try to put a selection in some node that's not part of the selection's document? Assuming it works, how is it presented to the user?
What does getSelection().getRangeAt(0).detach()
do?
anchorNode
Returns the element that contains the start of the selection.
Returns null if there's no selection.
anchorOffset
Returns the offset of the start of the selection relative to the element that contains the start of the selection.
Returns 0 if there's no selection.
focusNode
Returns the element that contains the end of the selection.
Returns null if there's no selection.
focusOffset
Returns the offset of the end of the selection relative to the element that contains the end of the selection.
Returns 0 if there's no selection.
The anchorNode
attribute must return the context object's anchor's node,
or null if the anchor is null.
The anchorOffset
attribute must return the context object's anchor's
offset, or 0 if the anchor is null.
The focusNode
attribute must return the context object's focus's node, or
null if the focus is null.
The focusOffset
attribute must return the context object's focus's
offset, or 0 if the focus is null.
isCollapsed
()
Returns true if there's no selection or if the selection is empty. Otherwise, returns false.
collapse
(node,
offset)
Replaces the selection with a collapsed one at the given position.
Throws an IndexSizeError
exception if offset is negative
or longer than node's length.
collapseToStart
()
Replaces the selection with an empty one at the position of the start of the current selection.
Throws an InvalidStateError
exception if there is no selection.
collapseToEnd
()
Replaces the selection with an empty one at the position of the end of the current selection.
Throws an InvalidStateError
exception if there is no selection.
extend
(node,
offset)
Changes the focus while leaving the anchor in place.
Throws an InvalidStateError
if there's no selection, an
InvalidNodeTypeError
if node is a doctype, and an
IndexSizeError
exception if offset is negative or longer
than node's length.
The isCollapsed
attribute must return true if the anchor and focus
are the same (including if both are null). Otherwise it must return false.
The collapse(node,
offset)
method must create a new range,
set both its start and end to
(node, offset), and set the context object's range
to the newly-created range.
For collapseToStart/End, IE9 mutates the existing range, while Firefox 9.0a2 and Chrome 15 dev replace it with a new one. The spec follows the majority and replaces it with a new one, leaving the old Range object unchanged.
The collapseToStart()
method
must throw an InvalidStateError
exception if the context object's
range is null. Otherwise, it must create a new range object,
set both its start and end to the
context object's range's start, and then set the
context object's range to the newly-created range.
The collapseToEnd()
method
must throw an InvalidStateError
exception if the context object's
range is null. Otherwise, it must create a new range object,
set both its start and end to the
context object's range's end, and then set the
context object's range to the newly-created range.
Reverse-engineered circa January 2011. IE doesn't support it, so I'm relying on Firefox (implemented extend() sometime before 2000) and WebKit (implemented extend() in 2007). I'm mostly ignoring Opera, because gsnedders tells me its implementation isn't compatible.
The extend(node,
offset)
method must run these steps:
Gecko raises a nonstandard exception, WebKit initializes to a zero-length selection at the given point, Opera silently ignores it. Gecko's behavior of throwing wins, but with a standardized exception type.
If the context object's range is null, throw an
InvalidStateError
exception and abort these steps.
Firefox 12.0a1 seems to mutate the existing range. IE9 doesn't support extend(), and it's impossible to tell whether Chrome 17 dev or Opera Next 12.00 alpha mutate or replace, because getRangeAt() returns a copy anyway. Nevertheless, I go against Gecko here, to be consistent with collapse().
Let new range be a new range.
Gecko sets the direction backwards here. Why backwards? I don't know. I'm ignoring direction for collapsed selections for now.
If node's root is not the same as the context object's range's root, set new range's start and end to (node, offset).
Reverse-engineered from WebKit circa January-February 2011. They were the ones who introduced it, and so far only Gecko has copied them in Firefox 4, which isn't even a final release yet, so presumably WebKit is the one to track. Still, it probably isn't so widely used yet, so I follow Gecko when it makes more sense.
selectAllChildren
(node)
Replaces the selection with one that contains all the contents of the given element.
deleteFromDocument
()
Deletes the selection.
Based mostly on Firefox 9.0a2. It has a bug that I didn't reproduce, namely that if you pass a Document as the argument, the end offset becomes 1 instead of the number of children it has. It also throws a RangeException instead of DOMException, because its implementation predated their merging.
IE9 behaves similarly but with glitches. It throws "Unspecified error." if the node is detached or display:none, and apparently in some random other cases too. It throws "Invalid argument." for detached comments (only!). Finally, if you pass it a comment, it seems to select the whole comment, unlike with text nodes.
Chrome 16 dev behaves as you'd expect given its Selection implementation. It refuses to select anything that's not visible, so it's almost always wrong. Opera 11.50 just does nothing in all my tests, as usual.
The selectAllChildren(node)
method must run the following steps:
The new range replaces any existing one, doesn't mutate it. This matches IE9 and Firefox 12.0a1. (Chrome 17 dev and Opera Next 12.00 alpha can't be tested, because getRangeAt() returns a copy anyway.)
Let range be a new range.
This is the one method that actually mutates the range instead of replacing it. This matches IE9 and Firefox 12.0a1. (Chrome 17 dev and Opera Next 12.00 alpha can't be tested, because getRangeAt() returns a copy anyway.)
The deleteFromDocument()
method must do nothing if the context object's range is null, and
otherwise must invoke the deleteContents()
method on the
context object's range.
Should we replace the range rather than mutating it here? This is currently the only Selection method that actually mutates an existing range in place.
rangeCount
Returns the number of ranges in the selection (either 0 or 1).
getRangeAt
(index)
Returns the selection's range, if index is 0.
Throws an IndexSizeError
exception if index is not 0, or if
there is no range in the selection.
addRange
(range)
Adds the given range to the selection.
removeRange
(range)
Unselects everyting, if range is in the selection. (Use
removeAllRanges()
instead.)
removeAllRanges
()
Unselects everything.
The rangeCount
attribute must return 0 if the context object's range is null, otherwise
1.
IE9 and Firefox 4.0 return the same object every time, as the spec says. Chrome 12 dev and Opera 11.10 return a different object every time.
The getRangeAt(index)
method must throw an IndexSizeError
exception if index is not
0, or if the context object's range is null. Otherwise, it must return
a reference to (not a copy of) the context object's range. (Thus
subsequent calls must return the same object if nothing has removed the
context object's range in the meantime.)
IE9 and Firefox 4.0 store a reference, as described here. Chrome 12 dev and Opera 11.10 appear to store a copy, so changes don't affect the selection.
Chrome 15 dev seems to ignore addRange() if there's already a range. IE9 replaces the existing range. Firefox 9.0a2, of course, just gives you a multi-range selection. IE is likely to behave closest to Firefox, and is also more useful than silent failure, so the spec goes with that.
The addRange(range)
method must set the context object's range to a reference to (not a copy
of) range. Since range is added by reference, subsequent
calls to getRangeAt(0)
must return
the same object, and any changes that a script makes to range after
it is added must be reflected in the selection, until something else
removes or replaces the context object's range.
The removeRange(range)
method must set the context object's range to null if its range is
currently range, otherwise do nothing.
Do we check for object equality here or just equality of boundary points?
The removeAllRanges()
method
must set the context object's range to null and its direction to
forwards.
The stringifier must . . .
Complicated. The Selection stringifier is magical like innerText. See W3C bug 10583.
This specification extends several interfaces to provide entry points to the interfaces defined in this specification.
getSelection
()
getSelection
()
Returns the Selection
object for the window, which
stringifies to the text of the current selection.
partial interface Document { Selection getSelection(); };
Originally Gecko returned the stringification here (bug 636512 fixed that).
Now, what happens if you create a Document object with no defaultView
(say via document.implementation.createHTMLDocument("")
) and call
getSelection()
on it? IE9 seems to return a different Selection
object. Firefox 12.0a1 and Opera Next 12.00 alpha return the same object as
for the current window. Chrome 17 dev returns null. See
discussion.
There's no meaningful selection associated with such a document, so we follow
WebKit and require returning null.
This leaves open the question of which documents should actually return
null. We somewhat cheat by deferring the question to the definition of
defaultView
, even though at the time of this writing that's
underdefined and
not very interoperable.
The getSelection()
method on the Document
interface must return
null if the context object's defaultView
is null, and the
context object's selection otherwise.
partial interface Window { Selection getSelection(); };
The getSelection()
method on the Window
interface must return
the same thing as calling
getSelection()
on the document
returned by the context object's
document
property.
This specification defines a number of commands, identified by ASCII case-insensitive strings. Each command can have several pieces of data associated with it:
execCommand()
. Every command defined in this
specification has an action defined for it in the relevant
section. For example, the bold
command's
action generally makes the current selection bold, or removes
bold if the selection is already bold. An editing toolbar might provide
buttons that execute the action for a command if
clicked, or a script might run an action without user
interaction to achieve some particular effect. Actions return either true or
false, which can affect the return value of execCommand()
.
queryCommandIndeterm()
, depending on the current state of the
document. Generally, a command that has a state
defined will be indeterminate if the state is true
for part but not all of the current selection, and a command
that has a value defined will be indeterminate if
different parts of the selection have different values. An editing toolbar might display a button or
control in a special way if the command is
indeterminate, like showing a "bold" button as partially
depressed, or leaving a font size selector blank instead of showing the font
size of the current selection. As a rule, a command can only be
indeterminate if its state is false, supposing it
has a state.
queryCommandState()
, depending on the current state of the
document. The state of a command is true if it is
already in effect, in some sense specific to the command. Most
commands that have a state defined
will take opposite actions depending on whether the
state is true or false, such as making the selection bold if the
state is false and removing bold if the state is
true. Others will just have no effect if the state is true,
like the justifyCenter
command. Still others
will have the same effect regardless, like the styleWithCss
command. An editing toolbar might display a
button or control differently depending on the state and indeterminacy of the command.
queryCommandValue()
,
depending on the current state of the document. A command
usually has a value instead of a state if the
property it modifies can take more than two different values, like the
foreColor
command. If the command is
indeterminate, its value is generally based on the
start of the selection. Otherwise, in most cases the value
holds true for the entire selection, but see the justifyCenter
command and its three companions for an exception. An
editing toolbar might display the value of a
command as selected in a drop-down or filled in in a text box,
if the command isn't indeterminate.
If you try doing anything with an unrecognized command (except queryCommandSupported), IE10 Developer Preview throws an "Invalid argument" exception. Firefox 15.0a1 throws NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED on querying indeterm/state/value, and returns false from execCommand/queryCommandEnabled. Chrome 19 dev returns false from everything. Opera Next 12.00 alpha throws NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR for execCommand and returns false for enabled/state/value. Originally I went with IE, although of course with a standard exception type. But after discussion (WebKit bug, Mozilla bug), I changed to match WebKit (except that I return "" for value instead of false). The issue is that there are a whole bunch of IE commands that no one else supports or wants to support, and throwing on execCommand() would make lots of pages break. WebKit was unwilling to take the compat risk, so we took the safer option.
Some commands will be supported in a
given user agent, and some will not. All commands
defined in this specification must be supported, except optionally
the copy
command, the cut
command, and/or the paste
command. Additional
vendor-specific commands can also be
supported, but implementers must prefix any
vendor-specific command names with a vendor-specific string (e.g.,
"ms", "moz", "webkit", "opera").
I.e., no trying to look good on lazy conformance tests by just sticking in a stub implementation that does nothing.
A command that does absolutely nothing in a particular user
agent, such that execCommand()
never has any effect and
queryCommandEnabled()
and queryCommandIndeterm()
and
queryCommandState()
and queryCommandValue()
each
return the same value all the time, must not be supported.
In a particular user agent, every command must be consistently either supported or not. Specifically, a user agent must not permit one page to see the same command sometimes supported and sometimes not over the course of the same browsing session, unless the user agent has been upgraded or reconfigured in the middle of a session. However, user agents may treat the same command as supported for some pages and not others, e.g., if the command is only supported for certain origins for security reasons.
Authors can tell whether a command is supported
using queryCommandSupported()
.
At any given time, a supported command can be either
enabled or not. Authors can tell whether a command is
currently enabled using queryCommandEnabled()
. Commands that are not enabled do nothing, as
described in the definitions of the various methods that invoke commands.
Testing with bold:
IE10PP2 seems to return true if the active range's start node is editable, false otherwise.
Firefox 6.0a2 seems to always return true if there's anything editable on the page, and throw otherwise. (This is bug 676401.)
Chrome 14 dev seems to behave the same as IE10PP2.
Opera 11.11 seems to always return true if there's anything editable on the page, and false otherwise.
Firefox and Opera behave more or less uselessly. IE doesn't make much sense, in that whether a command is enabled seems meaningless: it will execute it on all nodes in the selection, editable or not. Chrome's definition makes sense in that it will only run the command if it's enabled, but it doesn't make much sense to only have the command run if the start is editable.
It's not clear to me what the point of this method is. There's no way we're going to always return true if the command will do something and false if it won't. I originally just stuck with a really conservative definition that happens to be convenient: if there's nothing selected, obviously nothing will work, and we want to bail out early in that case anyway because all the algorithms will talk about the active range. If there are use-cases for it to be more precise, I could make it so.
Bug 16094 illustrated that we don't really want to be able to modify multiple editing hosts at once, nor do we want to do anything if the start and end aren't both editable, so I co-opted this definition to fit my ends.
Among commands defined in this specification,
those listed in Miscellaneous commands are
always enabled, except for the cut
command and the paste
command. The
other commands defined here are enabled
if the active range is not null, its start node is either
editable or an editing host, its end node is
either editable or an editing host, and there is some
editing host that is an inclusive ancestor of both its
start node and its end node.
We fire events as requested in bug 13118. This is a new feature does not currently match any browser. If you are implementing this, please make sure to file any feedback as bugs. The spec is not finalized yet and can still be easily changed.
[Constructor(DOMString type, optional EditingBeforeInputEventInit eventInitDict)] interface EditingBeforeInputEvent : Event { readonly attribute DOMString command; readonly attribute DOMString value; }; dictionary EditingBeforeInputEventInit : EventInit { DOMString command; DOMString value; }; [Constructor(DOMString type, optional EditingInputEventInit eventInitDict)] interface EditingInputEvent : Event { readonly attribute DOMString command; readonly attribute DOMString value; }; dictionary EditingInputEventInit : EventInit { DOMString command; DOMString value; };
We have two different interfaces because we might want to add additional members to the input event but not the beforeinput event, such as a list of nodes that were affected.
When an EditingBeforeInputEvent
object is created, the
command
and
value
attributes must both be initialized to the empty string, unless otherwise
specified.
When an EditingInputEvent
object is created, the
command
and
value
attributes must
both be initialized to the empty string, unless otherwise specified.
TODO: Define behavior for show UI.
When the execCommand(command,
show UI, value)
method on the HTMLDocument
interface is invoked, the user agent
must run the following steps:
For supported: see comment before Supported commands.
For enabled: I didn't research this closely, but at a first glance, this is possibly how Chrome 14 dev and Opera 11.11 behave. Maybe also Firefox 6.0a2, except it throws if the command isn't enabled, I think. IE9 returns true in at least some cases even if the command is disabled. TODO: Is this right? Maybe we should be returning false in other cases too?
If command is not in the Miscellaneous commands section:
We don't fire events for copy/cut/paste/undo/redo/selectAll because they should all have their own events. We don't fire events for styleWithCSS/useCSS because it's not obvious where to fire them, or why anyone would want them. We don't fire events for unsupported commands, because then if they became supported and were classified with the miscellaneous events, we'd have to stop firing events for consistency's sake.
Such an editing host must exist, because otherwise the command would not be enabled.
EditingBeforeInputEvent
interface. The event's
type
attribute must
be initialized to "beforeinput"; its
isTrusted
,
bubbles
, and
cancelable
attributes must be initialized to true; its
command
attribute
must be initialized to command; and its
value
attribute must
be initialized to value.
We have to check again whether the command is enabled, because the beforeinput handler might have done something annoying like getSelection().removeAllRanges().
This new affected editing host is what we'll fire the input event at in a couple of lines. We want to compute it beforehand just to be safe: bugs in the command action might remove the selection or something bad like that, and we don't want to have to handle it later. We recompute it after the beforeinput event is handled so that if the handler moves the selection to some other editing host, the input event will be fired at the editing host that was actually affected.
EditingInputEvent
interface. The event's
type
attribute must be
initialized to "input"; its
isTrusted
and
bubbles
attributes
must be initialized to true; its
command
attribute must be
initialized to command; and its
value
attribute must be
initialized to value.
When the queryCommandEnabled(command)
method on the HTMLDocument
interface is
invoked, the user agent must run the following steps:
See comment before Supported commands.
When the queryCommandIndeterm(command)
method on the HTMLDocument
interface is
invoked, the user agent must run the following steps:
For supported: see comment before Supported commands.
What happens if you call queryCommand(Indeterm|State|Value)() on a command where it makes no sense?
IE9 consistently returns false for all three. However, any command that has a state defined also has a value defined, which is equal to the state: it returns boolean true or false.
Firefox 6.0a2 consistently throws NS_ERROR_FAILURE for indeterm/state if not supported, and returns an empty string for value. Exceptions include unlink (seems to always return indeterm/state false), and styleWithCss/useCss (throw NS_ERROR_FAILURE even for value).
Chrome 14 dev returns false for all three, and even does this for unrecognized commands. It also always defines value if state is defined: it returns the state cast to a string, either "true" or "false".
Opera 11.11 returns false for state and "" for value (it doesn't support indeterm). Like Chrome, this is even for unrecognized commands.
Gecko's behavior is the most useful. If the author tries querying some aspect of a command that makes no sense, they shouldn't receive a value that looks like it might make sense but is actually just a constant. Originally, I went even further than Gecko: I required exceptions even for value, since doing otherwise makes no sense. But throwing more exceptions is less compatible on the whole than throwing more exceptions, so based on discussion, I switched to a behavior more like Opera, which is more or less IE/WebKit behavior but made slightly more sane.
If command is not supported or has no indeterminacy, return false.
When the queryCommandState(command)
method on the HTMLDocument
interface is
invoked, the user agent must run the following steps:
See comment on the comparable line for queryCommandIndeterm().
Firefox 6.0a2 always throws an exception when this is called. Opera 11.11 seems to return false if there's nothing editable on the page, which is unhelpful. The spec follows IE9 and Chrome 14 dev. The reason this is useful, compared to just running one of the other methods and seeing if you get a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR, is that other methods might throw different exceptions for other reasons. It's easier to check a boolean than to check exception types, especially since as of June 2011 UAs aren't remotely consistent on what they do with unsupported commands.
Actually, correction: Firefox < 15ish throws an exception if nothing editable is on the page. Otherwise it behaves just like IE/Chrome. See Mozilla bug 742240.
When the queryCommandSupported(command)
method on the HTMLDocument
interface is
invoked, the user agent must return true if command is
supported, and false otherwise.
When the queryCommandValue(command)
method on the HTMLDocument
interface is
invoked, the user agent must run the following steps:
This is what Firefox 6.0a2 and Opera 11.11 seem to do when the command isn't enabled. Chrome 14 dev seems to return the string "false", and IE9 seems to return boolean false. For the case where there's no value, or the command isn't supported, see the comment on the comparable line for queryCommandIndeterm().
If command is not supported or has no value, return the empty string.
Yuck. This is incredibly messy, as are lots of other fontSize-related things, but I don't want to define a whole second notion of value for the sake of a single command . . .
If command is "fontSize" and its value override is set, convert the value override to an integer number of pixels and return the legacy font size for the result.
All of these methods must treat their command argument ASCII case-insensitively.
The methods in this section have mostly been designed so that the following
invariants hold after execCommand()
is called, assuming it
didn't throw an exception:
queryCommandIndeterm()
will return false (or throw an
exception).
queryCommandState()
will return the opposite of what it did
before execCommand()
was called (or throw an exception).
queryCommandValue()
will return something equivalent to the
value passed to execCommand()
(or throw an exception).
"Equivalent" here needs to be construed broadly in some cases, such as
fontSize
.
The first two points do not always hold for strikethrough
or underline
, because it can be impossible to unset
text-decoration in CSS. Also, by design, the state of insertOrderedList
and insertUnorderedList
might
be true both before and after calling, because they only remove one level of
indentation. unlink
should set the value to null. And
finally, the state of the various justify
commands should
always be true after calling, and the value should always be the appropriate
string ("center", "justify", "left", or "right"). Any other deviations from
these invariants are bugs in the specification.
An HTML element is an Element
whose namespace is the
HTML namespace.
A prohibited paragraph child name is "address", "article", "aside", "blockquote", "caption", "center", "col", "colgroup", "dd", "details", "dir", "div", "dl", "dt", "fieldset", "figcaption", "figure", "footer", "form", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "header", "hgroup", "hr", "li", "listing", "menu", "nav", "ol", "p", "plaintext", "pre", "section", "summary", "table", "tbody", "td", "tfoot", "th", "thead", "tr", "ul", or "xmp".
These are all the things that will close a
if found as a descendant. I think. Plus table stuff, since that can't be a descendant of a p either, although it won't auto-close it.
A prohibited paragraph child is an HTML element whose local name is a prohibited paragraph child name.
The block/inline node definitions are CSS-based. "Prohibited paragraph child" is conceptually similar to "block node", but based on the element name. Generally we want to use block/inline node when we're interested in the visual effect, and prohibited paragraph children when we're concerned about parsing or semantics. TODO: Audit all "block node" usages to see if they need to become "visible block node", now that block nodes can be invisible (if they descend from display: none).
A block node is either an Element
whose "display" property
does not have resolved value "inline" or "inline-block" or "inline-table" or
"none", or a document, or a DocumentFragment
.
An inline node is a node that is not a block node.
An editing host is a node that is either an HTML
element with a contenteditable
attribute set to the true
state, or the HTML element child of a document whose designMode
is enabled.
Something is editable if it is a node; it is not an
editing host; it does not have a contenteditable
attribute set to the false
state; its parent is an editing host or editable;
and either it is an HTML element, or it is an svg
or math
element, or it is not an Element
and its parent is an HTML
element.
An editable node cannot be a document or
DocumentFragment
, its parent cannot be null, and it must descend from
either an Element
or a document.
The editing host of node is null if node is neither editable nor an editing host; node itself, if node is an editing host; or the nearest ancestor of node that is an editing host, if node is editable.
Two nodes are in the same editing host if the editing host of the first is non-null and the same as the editing host of the second.
Barring bugs, the algorithms here will not alter the attributes of a non-editable element; will not remove a non-editable node from its parent (except to immediately give it a new parent in the same editing host); and will not add, remove, or reorder children of a node unless it is either editable or an editing host. An editing host is never editable, so authors are assured that editing commands will only modify the editing host's contents and not the editing host itself.
A collapsed line break is a br
that begins a line box which
has nothing else in it, and therefore has zero height.
Is this a good definition at all? I mean things like
foo
foo
TODO: The thing about li is a not very nice hack. The issue is that an li won't collapse even if it has no children at all, but that's not true in all browsers (at least not in Opera 11.11), and also it breaks assumptions elsewhere. E.g., if it gets turned into a p.
An extraneous line break is a br
that has no visual effect,
in that removing it from the DOM would not change layout, except that a br
that is the sole child of an li
is not extraneous.
Also possibly a bad definition. Again, I test by just removing it and seeing what happens. (Actually, setting display: none, so that it doesn't mess up ranges.)
A whitespace node is either a Text
node whose data
is
the empty string; or a Text
node whose data
consists only of one or
more tabs (0x0009), line feeds (0x000A), carriage returns (0x000D), and/or
spaces (0x0020), and whose parent is an Element
whose resolved value for
"white-space" is "normal" or "nowrap"; or a Text
node whose data
consists only of one or more tabs (0x0009), carriage returns (0x000D), and/or
spaces (0x0020), and whose parent is an Element
whose resolved value for
"white-space" is "pre-line".
node is a collapsed whitespace node if the following algorithm returns true:
This definition is also bad. It's a crude attempt to emulate CSS2.1 16.6.1, but leaving out a ton of the subtleties. I actually don't want the exact CSS definitions, because those depend on things like where lines are broken, but I'm not sure this definition is right anyway. E.g., what about a pre-line text node consisting of a single line break that's at the end of a block? That collapses, same idea as an extraneous line break. We could also worry about nodes containing only zwsp or such if we wanted, or display: none, or . . .
data
is the empty string, return true.
At this point we know node consists of some whitespace, of a sort that will collapse if it's at the start or end of a line. We go backwards until we find the first block boundary, and if everything until there is invisible or whitespace, we conclude that node is collapsed. We assume a block boundary is either when we hit a line break or block node, or we hit the end of ancestor (which is the nearest ancestor block node). All this is very imprecise, of course, but it's fairly simple and will work in common cases.
We have to avoid invoking the definition of "visible" here to avoid infinite recursion: that depends on the concept of collapsed whitespace nodes. Instead, we repeat the parts we need, which turns out to be "not much of it".
Let reference be node.
br
,
return true.
Text
node that is not a
whitespace node, or is an img
, break from this loop.
We found something before our text node on (probably) the same line, so presumably it's not at the line's start. Now we need to look forward and see if we're at the line's end. If we aren't there either, then we assume we're not collapsed, so return false.
Let reference be node.
br
,
return true.
Text
node that is not a
whitespace node, or is an img
, break from this loop.
TODO: Consider whether we really want to depend on img specifically here. It seems more likely that we want something like "any replaced content that has nonzero height and width" or such. When fixing this, make sure to audit for other occurrences of this assumption.
Something is visible if it is a node that either is a
block node, or a Text
node that is not a collapsed
whitespace node, or an img
, or a br
that is not an
extraneous line break, or any node with a visible
descendant; excluding any node with an inclusive ancestor
Element
whose "display" property has resolved value "none".
Something is invisible if it is a node that is not visible.
TODO: Reconsider whether we want to lump invisible nodes in here. If we don't and change the definition, make sure to audit all callers, since then a block could have collapsed block prop descendants that aren't children.
A collapsed block prop is either a collapsed line
break that is not an extraneous line break, or an
Element
that is an inline node and whose children are all
either invisible or collapsed
block props and that has at least one child that is a
collapsed block prop.
A collapsed block prop is something like the
in
, or the
and in
. These are necessary to
stop the block from having zero height when it has no other contents, but serve
no purpose and should be removed once the block has other contents that stop it
from collapsing.
TODO: I say "first range" because I think that's what Gecko actually does, and Gecko is the only one that allows multiple ranges in a selection. This is keeping in mind that it stores ranges sorted by start, not by the order the user added them, and silently removes or shortens existing ranges to avoid overlap. It probably makes the most sense in the long term to have the command affect all ranges. But I'll leave this for later.
The active range is the range of the selection given by
calling getSelection()
on the context object. (Thus the active
range may be null.)
Each HTMLDocument
has a boolean CSS styling flag associated
with it, which must initially be false. (The styleWithCSS
command can be used to modify or query it, by
means of the execCommand()
and queryCommandState()
methods.)
Each HTMLDocument
is associated with a string known as the
default single-line container name, which must initially be "p".
(The defaultParagraphSeparator
command can be
used to modify or query it, by means of the execCommand()
and
queryCommandValue()
methods.)
For some commands, each HTMLDocument
must
have a boolean state override and/or a string value
override. These do not change the command's
state or value, but change the way some algorithms
behave, as specified in those algorithms' definitions. Initially, both must be
unset for every command. Whenever the number of ranges in the
selection changes to something different, and whenever a boundary point
of the range at a given index in the selection changes to something
different, the state override and value override must
be unset for every command. The value override for
the backColor
command must be the same as the
value override for the hiliteColor
command, such that setting one sets the other to the same thing and
unsetting one unsets the other.
The primary purpose of state and value overrides is that if the
user runs a command like bold
with a collapsed selection, then types something without moving the cursor,
they expect it to have the given style (bold or such). Thus the commands like
bold
set state and value
overrides, and insertText
checks for them and applies them to the
newly-inserted text. Other commands like delete
also interact with overrides.
See bug 16207.
When
document.open()
is
called and a document's singleton objects are all replaced by new instances
of those objects, editing state associated with that document (including the
CSS styling flag, default single-line container name,
and any state overrides or
value overrides) must be reset.
Of course, any action that replaces a document object entirely, such as reloading the page, will also reset any editing state associated with the document.
When this specification refers to a method or attribute that is defined in a specification, the user agent must treat the method or attribute as defined by that specification. In particular, if a script has overridden a standard property with a custom one, the user agent must only use the overridden property when a script refers to it, and must continue to use the specification-defined behavior when this specification refers to it.
When a list or set of nodes is assigned to a variable without specifying the order, they must be initially in tree order, if they share a root. (If they don't share a root, the order will be specified.) When the user agent is instructed to run particular steps for each member of a list, it must do so sequentially in the list's order.
To move a node to a new location, preserving ranges, remove the node from its original parent (if any), then insert it in the new location. In doing so, follow these rules instead of those defined by the insert and remove algorithms:
Many of the algorithms in this specification move nodes around in
the DOM. The normal rules for range mutation require that any range endpoints
inside those nodes are moved to the node's parent as soon as the node is moved,
which would corrupt the selection. For instance, if the user selects the text
"foo" and then bolds it, first we produce foo
, then foo
. When
we move the "foo" text node into its new parent, we have to do so "preserving
ranges", so that the text "foo" is still selected.
This is actually implicit, but I state it anyway for completeness.
If a boundary point's node is the same as or a descendant of node, leave it unchanged, so it moves to the new location.
TODO: Do we want to get rid of attributes that are no longer allowed here?
To set the tag name of an Element
element to
new name:
This is needed because the DOM doesn't allow any way of changing an existing element's name. Sometimes we want to, e.g., convert a markup element to a span. In that case we invoke this algorithm to create a new element, move it to the right place, copy attributes from the old element, move the old element's children, and remove the old element.
createElement(new name)
on
the ownerDocument
of element.
To remove extraneous line breaks before a node node:
bar
sometimes has no effect in CSS, such
as in the markup foo
. In such cases
we like to remove the extra markup to keep things tidy.
previousSibling
of node.
lastChild
.
To remove extraneous line breaks at the end of a node node:
lastChild
.
To remove extraneous line breaks from a node, first remove extraneous line breaks before it, then remove extraneous line breaks at the end of it.
To wrap a list node list of consecutive sibling nodes, run the following algorithm. In addition to node list, the algorithm accepts two inputs: an algorithm sibling criteria that accepts a node as input and outputs a boolean, and an algorithm new parent instructions that accepts nothing as input and outputs a node or null. If not provided, sibling criteria returns false and new parent instructions returns null.
This algorithm basically does two things. First, it looks at the
previous and next siblings of the nodes in node list. If running
sibling criteria on one or both of the siblings returns true, the
nodes in node list are moved into the sibling(s). Otherwise,
new parent instructions is run, and the result is used to wrap
node list. For instance, to wrap node list in a , one might invoke this algorithm with sibling
criteria returning true only for
elements and
new parent instructions creating and returning a new
element.
We need to treat br
s as visible here even if they're
not, because wrapping them might be significant even if they're invisible: it
can turn an extraneous line break into a non-extraneous one.
If every member of node list is invisible, and
none is a br
, return null and abort these steps.
Trailing br's like this always need to go along with their line. Otherwise they'll create an extra line if we wrap in a block element, instead of vanishing as they should.
If node list's last member is an inline node
that's not a br
, and node list's last member's nextSibling
is a br
, append that br
to node list.
See bug 13811, bug 14231. If
there's a non-adjacent sibling that matches the sibling criteria and only
invisible nodes intervene, we want to skip over the invisible nodes. For
instance, bolding [bar]foo[baz]
should produce
foobaz
. Similarly, and more usefully, creating an
ordered list with
should produce
, not
.
While node list's first member's previousSibling
is
invisible, prepend it to node list.
nextSibling
is
invisible, append it to node list.
previousSibling
of the first member of node list
is editable and running sibling criteria on it
returns true, let new parent be the previousSibling
of the
first member of node list.
nextSibling
of the last member of node
list is editable and running sibling criteria
on it returns true, let new parent be the nextSibling
of the
last member of node list.
This can only happen if new parent instructions is run and it returns null. This can be used to only merge with adjacent siblings, in case you don't want to create a new parent if that fails.
If new parent is null, abort these steps and return null.
Most callers will create a new element to return in new parent instructions, whose parent will therefore be null. But they can also return an existing node if that makes sense, so the nodes will be moved to an uncle or something. The toggle lists algorithm makes use of this.
If new parent's parent is null:
Basically, we want any boundary points around the wrapped nodes to go
inside the wrapper. Without this step, wrapping "{}
" in a blockquote
would go like
{}
-> {}
-> {}.
The second line is due to range mutation rules: a boundary point with an offset equal to the index of a newly-inserted node stays put, so it remains before it. With this step, it goes like
{}
-> {}
-> {}
->{}.
The difference in the final step is because we move the
"preserving
ranges". This means that adjacent boundary points get swept along with it.
Previously, the
intervened, so a boundary point after it would get taken along but one before it would not.Another solution that one might be tempted to consider would be to just put the wrapper after the wrapped elements. Then the boundary points would stay put, before the wrapper, so they'd still be adjacent to the nodes to be wrapped, like:
{foo
} -> {foo
} ->{.foo
}The problem is that this completely breaks if you're wrapping multiple things and not all are selected. It would go like this:
foo
{bar
} ->foo
{bar
} ->foo
{->bar
}{.foo
bar
}The last step is again because of the range mutation rules: the boundary point stays put when a new node is inserted. They're fundamentally asymmetric.
An alternative solution would be to define the concept of moving a list of adjacent sibling nodes while preserving ranges, and handle this explicitly at a more abstract level.
TODO: Think about this some more. Maybe there's a better way.
If any range has a boundary point with node equal to the parent of new parent and offset equal to the index of new parent, add one to that boundary point's offset.
br
, call createElement("br")
on the
ownerDocument
of new parent and append the result as the
last child of new parent.
br
, call createElement("br")
on the
ownerDocument
of new parent and insert the result as the
first child of new parent.
This could happen if new parent instructions returned a node whose parent wasn't null.
If original parent is editable and has no children, remove it from its parent.
Probably because both the previous and next sibling met them. We want to merge them in this case.
If new parent's nextSibling
is editable and
running sibling criteria on it returns true:
nextSibling
's first child are both inline
nodes, and new parent's last child is not a br
,
call createElement("br")
on the
ownerDocument
of new parent and append the result as the
last child of new parent.
nextSibling
has children, append
its first child as the last child of new parent,
preserving ranges.
nextSibling
from its parent.
List is mostly based on current HTML5, together with obsolete elements. I mostly got the obsolete element list by testing what Firefox 5.0a2 splits when you do insertHorizontalRule.
TODO: The definitions of prohibited paragraph children and elements with inline contents should be in the HTML spec (possibly under a different name) so they don't fall out of sync. They'll do for now.
A name of an element with inline contents is "a", "abbr", "b", "bdi", "bdo", "cite", "code", "dfn", "em", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "i", "kbd", "mark", "p", "pre", "q", "rp", "rt", "ruby", "s", "samp", "small", "span", "strong", "sub", "sup", "u", "var", "acronym", "listing", "strike", "xmp", "big", "blink", "font", "marquee", "nobr", or "tt".
An element with inline contents is an HTML element whose local name is a name of an element with inline contents.
TODO: This list doesn't currently match HTML's validity requirements for a few reasons:
I deliberately allow dt
to contain headers and such, in violation of
HTML. If I didn't, then when the user tried to formatBlock a dt
as a
header, it would break apart the whole dl
, which seems worse. See bug 13201.
A node or string child is an allowed child of a node or string parent if the following algorithm returns true:
Often we move around nodes, and sometimes this can result in
unreasonable things like two 's nested inside one
another. This algorithm checks for DOMs we never want to have, so that other
algorithms can avoid creating them or fix them if they do happen. The
fix disallowed ancestors algorithm is one frequently-invoked
caller of this algorithm.
Text
node whose data
does not
consist solely of space characters, return false.
Actually, no node can occur in the DOM after plaintext, generally. But let's not get too carried away.
If parent is "script", "style", "plaintext", or "xmp", or an
HTML element with local name equal to one of those, and
child is not a Text
node, return false.
DocumentFragment
, or
DocumentType
, return false.
Cannot be serialized as text/html. In some cases it can, like foo
bar |
If child is "a", and parent or some ancestor
of parent is an a
, return false.
This generally cannot be serialized either, for p. For
other elements with inline contents, this serves to prevent things like
foo
If child is a prohibited paragraph child name and parent or some ancestor of parent is an element with inline contents, return false.
Also can't be serialized as text/html.
If child is "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", or "h6", and parent or some ancestor of parent is an HTML element with local name "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", or "h6", return false.
Further requirements only care about the parent itself, not ancestors, so we don't need to know the node itself.
Let parent be the local name of parent.
Element
or DocumentFragment
, return
true.
We allow children even where some intervening nodes will be inserted, like tr as a child of table.
If parent is on the left-hand side of an entry on the following list, then return true if child is listed on the right-hand side of that entry, and false otherwise.
dd/dt/li will serialize fine as the child of random stuff, but it makes no sense at all, so we want to avoid it anyway.
If child is "dd" or "dt" and parent is not "dl", return false.
The difference between "contained" and "effectively contained" is basically that 1) in [foo], the text node and the are effectively contained but not contained; and 2) in f[o]o, the text node is effectively contained but not contained, and the is neither effectively contained nor contained.
A node node is effectively contained in a
range range if range is not collapsed
, and
at least one of the following holds:
So like f[oo] or f[o]o or f[oo}, but not foo[} or f[]oo.
node is range's start node, it is a Text
node, and its length is different from range's
start offset.
Text
node,
and range's end offset is not 0.
Basically, anything whose children are all effectively contained should be effectively contained itself, except that in a case like f[o]o we don't want to be effectively contained even though the text node is. That's because we split the text node before we actually do anything, and the will no longer be effectively contained.
node has at least one child; and all its children are
effectively contained in range; and either
range's start node is not a descendant of node
or is not a Text
node or range's start offset is zero; and
either range's end node is not a descendant of
node or is not a Text
node or range's end offset
is its end node's length.
A modifiable element is a b
, em
, i
, s
, span
,
strike
, strong
, sub
, sup
, or u
element with no attributes
except possibly style
; or a font
element with no attributes except
possibly style
, color
, face
, and/or size
; or an
a
element with no attributes except possibly style
and/or href
.
A simple modifiable element is an HTML element for which at least one of the following holds:
a
, b
, em
, font
, i
, s
, span
,
strike
, strong
, sub
, sup
, or u
element with no
attributes.
a
, b
, em
, font
, i
, s
, span
,
strike
, strong
, sub
, sup
, or u
element with exactly one
attribute, which is style
, which sets no CSS properties (including
invalid or unrecognized properties).
a
element with exactly one attribute, which is href
.
font
element with exactly one attribute, which is either
color
, face
, or size
.
b
or strong
element with exactly one attribute, which is
style
, and the style
attribute sets exactly one CSS property
(including invalid or unrecognized properties), which is "font-weight".
i
or em
element with exactly one attribute, which is
style
, and the style
attribute sets exactly one CSS property
(including invalid or unrecognized properties), which is "font-style".
a
, font
, or span
element with exactly one attribute,
which is style
, and the style
attribute sets exactly one CSS property
(including invalid or unrecognized properties), and that property is not
"text-decoration".
a
, font
, s
, span
, strike
, or u
element
with exactly one attribute, which is style
, and the style
attribute
sets exactly one CSS property (including invalid or unrecognized properties),
which is "text-decoration", which is set to "line-through" or "underline" or
"overline" or "none".
Conceptually, a simple modifiable element is a modifiable element
which specifies a value for at most one command. As the names imply, inline
formatting commands will try not to modify anything other than modifiable
elements. For instance, normally creates italics,
but it's not modifiable, so running the
italic
command will not remove it: it will nest inside.
A formattable node is an editable
visible node that is either a Text
node, an img
, or a
br
.
Two quantities are equivalent values for a command if either both are null, or both are strings and they're equal and the command does not define any equivalent values, or both are strings and the command defines equivalent values and they match the definition.
Two quantities are loosely equivalent values for a
command if either they are equivalent values for the
command, or if the command is the fontSize
command; one of the quantities is one of
"x-small", "small", "medium", "large", "x-large", "xx-large", or "xxx-large";
and the other quantity is the resolved value of "font-size" on a font
element
whose size
attribute has the corresponding value set ("1" through "7"
respectively).
Loose equivalence needs to be used when comparing effective command values to other values, while regular equivalence is used in other cases. The effective command value for fontSize is converted to pixels, so comparing it to a specified value literally would produce false negatives. But a specified value in pixels is actually different from a specified value like "small" or "x-large", because there is no precise mapping from such keywords to pixels.
If a command has inline command activated values defined but nothing else defines when it is indeterminate, it is indeterminate if among formattable nodes effectively contained in the active range, there is at least one whose effective command value is one of the given values and at least one whose effective command value is not one of the given values.
For bold and similar commands, IE 9 RC seems to consider the state true or false depending on the first element. All other browsers follow the same general idea as the spec, considering a range bold only if all text in it is bold, and this seems to match at least OpenOffice.org's bold feature. Opera 11.11 seemingly doesn't take CSS into account, and only looks at whether something descends from a . I couldn't properly test IE9 because it threw exceptions (Error: Unspecified error.) on most of the tests I ran. But what I have here seems to match Firefox 6.0a2 in every case, and Chrome 14 dev in all cases with a few exceptions.
If a command has inline command activated values defined, its state is true if either no formattable node is effectively contained in the active range, and the active range's start node's effective command value is one of the given values; or if there is at least one formattable node effectively contained in the active range, and all of them have an effective command value equal to one of the given values.
Testing with hiliteColor: Opera 11.11 seems to always return the effective command value of the active range's start node. Chrome 14 dev returns boolean false consistently, bizarrely enough. Firefox 6.0a2 seems to follow the same idea as the spec, but it likes to return "transparent", including sometimes when the answer really clearly should not be "transparent". IE9 throws exceptions most of the time for backColor, so I can't say for sure, but in the few cases where it doesn't throw it returns a random-looking number, so I'll assume it's crazy like for foreColor.
I decided on something that would guarantee the following invariant: whenever you execute a command with a value provided (assuming value is relevant), queryCommandValue() will always return something equivalent to what you set.
If a command is a standard inline value command, it is indeterminate if among formattable nodes that are effectively contained in the active range, there are two that have distinct effective command values. Its value is the effective command value of the first formattable node that is effectively contained in the active range; or if there is no such node, the effective command value of the active range's start node; or if that is null, the empty string.
The notions of inline command activated values and standard inline value commands are mostly just shorthand to avoid repeating the same boilerplate half a dozen times.
The effective command value of a node node for a given command is returned by the following algorithm, which will return either a string or null:
This is logically somewhat like CSS computed or resolved values,
and in fact for most commands it's identical to CSS resolved values (see the
end of the algorithm). We need a separate concept for some commands where we
can't rely on CSS for some reason: createLink and unlink aren't CSS-related at
all, backColor and hiliteColor need special treatment because background-color
isn't an inherited property, subscript and superscript rely on /
instead of CSS
vertical-align, and strikethrough and underline don't map to unique CSS
properties.
Element
, return
null.
Element
, return the effective
command value of its parent for command.
Element
, set node to its parent.
What happens if everything's background is fully transparent? See bug. If you do queryCommandValue() for backColor/hiliteColor when no backgrounds are set anywhere, so it goes up to the root element, no two engines agree. IE10PP2 just returns a random-looking number (16777215). Firefox 8.0a2 returns "transparent", Chrome 15 dev returns "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)", and Opera 11.50 returns "rgb(255, 255, 255)".
Opera's behavior is incorrect. The current page might be an iframe, in which case the background really will be transparent and the (inaccessible) background color of the parent page will show through. Also, the user might have changed their preferences, but I'm not too worried about that.
So instead we just return the value as-is. This means that it will be fully transparent, which is perhaps somewhat useless information, but it's the best we can do. More generally, any non-opaque value is not going to tell you what you actually want, namely "what color is the user actually seeing?" We have no realistic way to work around this in the general case.
Return the resolved value of "background-color" for node.
Firefox 6.0a2 ignores vertical-align for this purpose, and only cares about and tags themselves. Opera 11.11 is similar, and in fact behaves like that even for commands like bold. The spec originally followed Chrome 14 dev, mainly because WebKit itself will produce spans with vertical-align sub or super, and we want to handle them correctly. However, Ryosuke informs me that WebKit's behavior here is viewed as a bug, so I changed it to match Gecko/Opera.
If node is a sub
, set affected by subscript
to true.
sup
, set affected by
superscript to true.
The specified command value of an Element
element
for a given command is returned by the following algorithm, which
will return either a string or null:
This is logically somewhat like CSS inline style. In addition to
the caveats for effective command value, we also treat elements like and
as having the same meaning
as
s with inline style set, because they're
logically pretty much the same and can in fact be produced by the same command
depending on the CSS styling flag.
Element
's display property does not have resolved value "inline", return
null.
style
attribute set, and that attribute sets "text-decoration":
style
attribute sets "text-decoration" to a
value containing "line-through", return "line-through".
s
or strike
element, return "line-through".
style
attribute set, and that attribute sets "text-decoration":
style
attribute sets "text-decoration" to a
value containing "underline", return "underline".
u
element, return "underline".
style
attribute set, and that attribute has
the effect of setting property, return the value that it sets
property to.
font
element that has an attribute whose
effect is to create a presentational hint for property, return
the value that the hint sets property to. (For a size
of
7, this will be the non-CSS value "xxx-large".)
To record the values of a list of nodes node list:
When we move nodes around, we often change their parents. If
their parents had any styles applied, this will make the nodes' styles change
too, which often isn't what we want. For instance, if something is wrapped in
, and a script runs
the
outdent
command on it, the blockquote will
be removed and the style will go along with it. Recording the values of its
children first, then restoring them afterward, will ensure the nodes don't
change color when outdented.
As with removeFormat, we put subscript first so it doesn't interfere with fontSize, and omit superscript because it's redundant with subscript.
For each node in node list, for each command in the list "subscript", "bold", "fontName", "fontSize", "foreColor", "hiliteColor", "italic", "strikethrough", and "underline" in that order:
Element
, set it to its parent.
Element
and its specified
command value for command is null, set it to its
parent.
Element
, add (node,
command, ancestor's specified command
value for command) to values. Otherwise add
(node, command, null) to values.
To restore the values specified by a list values returned by the record the values algorithm:
Element
, set it to its parent.
Element
and its specified
command value for command is null, set it to its
parent.
Element
,
push down values on node for command,
with new value null.
Element
and its
specified command value for command is not equivalent to value, or if
ancestor is not an Element
and value is not null,
force the value of command to value on
node.
To clear the value of an Element
element:
The idea is to remove any specified command value that the element might have for the command. This might involve changing its attributes, setting its tag name, or removing it entirely while leaving its children in place. The key caller is set the selection's value, which clears the values of everything in the selection before doing anything else to keep the markup tidy.
We want to abort early so that we don't try unsetting background-color on a non-inline element.
If element's specified command value for command is null, return the empty list.
style
attribute that sets "text-decoration" to some value containing
"line-through", delete "line-through" from the value.
style
attribute that sets "text-decoration" to some value containing
"underline", delete "underline" from the value.
font
element:
a
element and command is
"createLink" or "unlink", unset the href
property of element.
If we get past this step, we're something like where we want to keep the extra attributes, so we stick them on a span.
If element's specified command value for command is null, return the empty list.
This algorithm goes up to just below the nearest ancestor with the right style, then re-applies the bad styles repeatedly going down, omitting the things we want to have the new style. This is basically what WebKit does, although WebKit sometimes starts higher up and therefore makes more intrusive changes, often creating more markup. IE follows the same general approach too.
Gecko instead seems to start breaking up elements from the bottom, so that the range consists of a few consecutive siblings, and it can then break up the problematic element into a maximum of two pieces. The spec's approach seems to create fewer elements and simpler markup (or at least markup that's no more complex) in most cases I throw at it.
Gecko's approach does have the major advantage that it gets underlines right in many cases for free. E.g.,
foo[bar]baz -> foobarbaz (spec) -> foobarbaz (Gecko)
The spec's markup here is much shorter and contains fewer elements, but is wrong: the underline under "baz" has changed color from black to red. It might be worth trying to copy Gecko's results in such cases, but that won't solve all underline problems, so perhaps it's not worth it.
Opera also seems to break up the markup surrounding the range, but even more aggressively: even if it doesn't need to pull down styles. In some cases this does actually result in shorter markup, specifically if the existing tags are short (like i or b) and we're adding tags that are long (like span with a style attribute).
To push down values to a node node, given a new value new value:
The idea here is that if an undesired value is being propagated from an ancestor, we remove that style from the ancestor and re-apply it to all the descendants other than node. This way we don't have to have nested styles, which is usually more cluttered (although not always).
E.g., a text node child of a document fragment.
Element
and the effective command value of command is not
loosely equivalent to new value on it, append current
ancestor to ancestor list, then set current
ancestor to its parent.
We can only remove specified values, so if the value isn't specified, give up. Unless we're actually trying to push down a null specified value, like for unlink.
If propagated value is null and is not equal to new value, abort this algorithm.
If we go all the way up to the root and still don't have the desired value, pushing down values is pointless. It will create extra markup for no purpose. Except if the value is null, which basically just means "try to get rid of anything affecting the current element but don't aim for any specific value".
Nevertheless, Chrome 14 dev does seem to do this. Running bold on f[o]o breaks up the span and adds a as a sibling. In IE9, Firefox 6.0a2, and Opera 11.50, it instead nests the inside the . It's a tradeoff: WebKit's behavior is better for things like
fo[ob]ar -> fo[ob]ar
(where the spec adds two extra font tags instead of one), but the spec is simpler for things like
f[o]o -> f[o]o
(where WebKit splits the existing tag up in addition to creating a new tag). I'm not particularly sure which approach is better overall, so I'll go with the majority of browsers. If these algorithms move to use runs of consecutive siblings instead of doing everything node-by-node, it might make sense to break up the parent as long as it won't create an extra node (i.e., we're styling something that includes the first or last child).
If the effective command value of command is not loosely equivalent to new value on the parent of the last member of ancestor list, and new value is not null, abort this algorithm.
TODO: This will be incorrect for relative font sizes. If the font size on the parent was removed and the font size on the child is in ems or percents or something, it will now change value. This isn't likely to come up, so we'll ignore it for now.
If child is an Element
whose specified command
value for command is neither null nor equivalent to propagated
value, continue with the next child.
To force the value of a node node to new value:
This algorithm checks if the node has the desired value, and if not, it wraps the node (or, if that's not possible, its descendants) in a simple modifiable element. After forcing the value, descendants might still have a different value.
Even if the value matches, we stick it in a preceding sibling if possible. This ensures "abc" -> "abc" instead of "abc". While we're at it, we also handle more elaborate cases like foo[bar]baz and even foo[bar]baz (the latter becomes foobarbaz).
Theoretically this algorithm could pointlessly reorganize the DOM in the event of unreasonable style rules, but it's not a big enough deal for us to care, since the resulting style will still be right.
Reorder modifiable descendants of node's
previousSibling
.
nextSibling
.
The new parent instructions we'd want are too complicated to reasonably feed into the wrap algorithm, so we just let them return null and do the wrapping ourselves if sibling criteria didn't return true.
Wrap the one-node list consisting of node, with sibling criteria returning true for a simple modifiable element whose specified command value is equivalent to new value and whose effective command value is loosely equivalent to new value and false otherwise, and with new parent instructions returning null.
If node is invisible, abort this algorithm.
Element
s whose specified command
value for command is neither null nor equivalent to new value.
This means that if it has no children, we do nothing. IE9 inserts an empty wrapper element in that case, but I'm not sure what the point is, and no one else does, so I don't. WebKit seems to ignore the node if its only child consists solely of whitespace, but I don't see any grounds for that and no one else does, so I don't.
Force the value of each node in children, with command and new value as in this invocation of the algorithm.
createElement("b")
on the
ownerDocument
of node.
createElement("i")
on the
ownerDocument
of node.
TODO: Actual UAs use strike, not s, but s is shorter and HTML5 makes strike invalid. I've gone with s for now, but maybe we want to change the spec to require strike.
If command is "strikethrough" and new value is
"line-through", let new parent be the result of calling createElement("s")
on the
ownerDocument
of node.
createElement("u")
on the
ownerDocument
of node.
See comment for foreColor for discussion. TODO: Define more carefully what happens when things are out of range or not integers or whatever.
If command is "foreColor", and new value is fully opaque with red, green, and blue components in the range 0 to 255:
createElement("font")
on the
ownerDocument
of node.
color
attribute of new parent to the
result of applying the rules for serializing
simple color values to new value (interpreted as a
simple color).
createElement("font")
on the
ownerDocument
of node, then set the face
attribute
of new parent to new value.
createElement("a")
on the
ownerDocument
of node.
href
attribute of new parent to new
value.
Nested a elements are bad, because they can't be serialized to text/html. hrefs should already have been cleared in a previous step, but we might have or such lurking about.
Let ancestor be node's parent.
TODO: This will mean any link-specific attributes will be transferred, which makes them both invalid and useless. Is that okay? I don't really want to list them all, because that sort of list is prone to bitrot.
If ancestor is an a
, set the tag name of
ancestor to "span", and let ancestor be the
result.
WebKit is the only engine that ever outputs anything but font tags for fontSize. For size=7, it uses font-size: -webkit-xxx-large. We just output a font tag no matter what for size=7.
If command is "fontSize"; and new value is one of
"x-small", "small", "medium", "large", "x-large", "xx-large", or
"xxx-large"; and either the CSS styling flag is false, or
new value is "xxx-large": let new parent be the result
of calling createElement("font")
on the
ownerDocument
of node, then set the size
attribute of
new parent to the number from the following table based on
new value:
We always use sup/sub elements, even in CSS mode, following Gecko and contradicting WebKit. This is because , the obvious equivalent (and what WebKit uses), behaves quite differently: it doesn't reduce font-size, which is ugly. WebKit's behavior is a bug anyway.
If command is "subscript" or "superscript" and new
value is "subscript", let new parent be the result of
calling createElement("sub")
on the ownerDocument
of node.
createElement("sup")
on the ownerDocument
of node.
createElement("span")
on the ownerDocument
of
node.
This preserves boundary points correctly, as usual.
Insert new parent in node's parent before node.
Need to be explicit. I think "if the new value would be valid" means "if the new value isn't xxx-large for font-size", need to double-check.
Element
and the effective command
value of command for node is not
loosely equivalent to new value:
Element
s whose specified command
value for command is neither null nor equivalent to new value.
To reorder modifiable descendants of a node node, given a command command and a value new value:
If candidate had no children, any boundary point inside it will get moved to its parent here, which is okay. We don't want to preserve ranges, because that would move boundary points that originally were in candidate but were moved to its parent by the last step to move to node's parent.
We move to after node so that boundary points before and after node wind up consistently inside candidate when we move preserving ranges. If we had
{foo }
it thus becomes
{foo }
by the range mutation rules, and then when we move preserving ranges, it becomes
{ foo }
which is reasonable.
If we had inserted candidate before node, instead it would go
{foo } {foo }
because of the interaction of regular range mutation rules with preserving-ranges rules.
Insert candidate into node's parent immediately after node.
To set the selection's value to new value:
The effect of this algorithm is to ensure that all nodes effectively contained in the selection have the value requested, producing the simplest markup possible to achieve that effect. It's inspired by the approach WebKit takes. The only places where the algorithm should fail are when there's an !important CSS rule that conflicts with the requested style (which we don't try to override because we assume it's !important for a reason), or when it's literally impossible to succeed (such as when a text-decoration or link URL is propagated from a non-editable ancestor). Any other failures are bugs.
First, if a node has a specified command value for the command,
we unset it (clear its value). This step
also removes simple modifiable
elements entirely, and replaces elements like b
or font
with
span
s if they aren't simple modifiable elements. This will be sufficient
if the desired value is inherited from an ancestor, or if it's the default
(like font-style: normal) and no conflicting value is inherited from an
ancestor. Even if clearing values doesn't actually fix the style of the node
we're dealing with, we do it anyway to simplify the generated markup.
If clearing values didn't work, and it looks like an ancestor has a specified command value that we're inheriting, we push the value down from that ancestor. Thus if we're unbolding the letter "r" in
we get
If we didn't push down values, the final step (forcing values) would instead give us
which is much longer and uglier. We take care not to disturb the style or semantics of anything but the node we're dealing with.
We'll only push down values if some ancestor actually has the value we want, so we can inherit it. Otherwise, it will just create useless markup.
Finally, if neither of the above strategies worked, we have to add new markup to get the desired value (forcing the value). First we try just sticking it into its previous or next sibling, if that's a simple modifiable element (so it won't add any styles or semantics we don't want). Otherwise, we create a new simple modifiable element and wrap it in that. It's common that a previous sibling is the simple modifiable element we want, because often we'll set the value of several consecutive siblings in succession. In that case, the element created for the first can be reused for the later ones.
This last step works a bit differently if the node isn't an allowed child of "span". In that case, wrapping it in a simple modifiable element would make the document less conforming than it already was, or would cause other problems. Instead, we recursively force the value of its children. The recursion will terminate when we hit a node that's an allowed child of "span", or when there are no further descendants. (In the latter case, there are no descendants that are text nodes or such, so we don't really need to style anything.)
After all this, the node is guaranteed to have the value we want, barring bugs in the algorithm or the two exceptions noted earlier (!important style rules, and impossible cases). We then re-run the algorithm on each child recursively. Typically this means just clearing the value of each descendant, because it should then inherit the value we just set on its ancestor. In the unusual case that a descendant's value is wrong even after we clear its value, such as because of a non-inline style rule (like trying to unbold a heading), we'll repeat the above steps to ensure that the value really gets set as desired.
IE9 seems to wrap the whole line instead, or something like that, although it does nothing for createLink. We follow all other browsers' general behavior: change the state/value, and then make sure that takes effect if the user types something before changing the cursor position.
If there is no formattable node effectively contained in the active range:
The last sentence here just prettifies the resulting range a bit.
If the active range's start node is an
editable Text
node, and its start offset is neither zero
nor its start node's length, call splitText()
on the active
range's start node, with argument equal to the active
range's start offset. Then set the active range's
start node to the result, and its start offset to zero.
Text
node, and its end offset is neither zero
nor its end node's length, call splitText()
on the active
range's end node, with argument equal to the active
range's end offset.
Element
s
effectively contained in the active range.
We skip non-editable nodes.
I chose to go with the non-IE behavior, per discussion. Ignoring non-editable things is convenient for the common use-case of an editor, where you don't want the user to bold random parts of the UI when they hit the bold button. For cases where it's not desired, you can always turn designMode on briefly before using execCommand(), so the non-IE behavior is a lot easier to work around than the IE behavior.
I don't see the value in ever just ignoring execCommand(). If the start and end are not editable, I'm going to say you should still style any editable nodes in between. I'm also going to ignore non-editable nodes for the purposes of determining state, so (for instance) if all the editable nodes are bolded, it will unbold instead of bolding.
Let node list be all editable nodes effectively contained in the active range.
TODO: This is inefficient. It would be most efficient to only push down values on the highest-level effectively contained nodes, and to batch operations so we handle runs of adjacent siblings at once. Should we bother fixing this?
For each node in node list:
If the node isn't an allowed child of "span", forcing its value will just force its children's value, which is redundant. So don't.
If node is an allowed child of "span", force the value of node.
backColor
commandFor historical reasons, backColor and hiliteColor behave identically.
We have three behaviors to choose from for this one:
(1) is obviously redundant, but has plurality support, so we could spec it that way if the other ways were useless.
(3) is incoherent from a user perspective. For instance, if you try it on paragraphs the background will have big gaps where the margins are. If you try it on an inline element that's a child of the editing host, it will do nothing or apply the background to everything or such, even though such an inline element is visually indistinguishable from one sitting inside a div. This would only make sense if we take considerable effort to ensure that block elements all have no margins, or if we wrap things in a div if they have margins, or something like that.
That leaves (2). That might be useful if it actually set the document's background color, but it seems like it sets table cell backgrounds sometimes instead, which is really confusing.
The path of least resistance is to standardize this as meaning the same thing as hiliteColor, and make up new commands if we want to do things like set the document background color. See hiliteColor for comments.
Relevant CSS property: "background-color"
Equivalent values: Either both strings are valid CSS colors and have the same red, green, blue, and alpha components, or neither string is a valid CSS color.
bold
commandIf the selection is collapsed (but not if it contains nothing but is not collapsed), IE9 wraps the whole line in a . This seems bizarre and no one else does it, so I don't do it. It's a similar story for similar commands (fontName, italic, etc.). Except not for strikethrough, where it just does nothing if the selection is empty. Why strikethrough? I don't know.
Action: If queryCommandState("bold")
returns true,
set the selection's value to "normal". Otherwise set the
selection's value to "bold". Either way, return true.
The cutoff of 600 matches Chrome 14 dev. The cutoff used by IE9 and Firefox 6.0a2 seems to be 500, and the distinction isn't relevant for Opera 11.11 (it doesn't use CSS here at all AFAICT). On my test systems with default fonts, Chrome 14 dev displays 700 and up as bold, while the other three display 600 and up as bold.
Thus in Chrome on my system, the bold command will behave a bit oddly the first time you hit it if there's anything in the range with font-weight: 600, but it will look right in other browsers. On the other hand, if I followed IE/Firefox, it would look wrong on all my browsers for font-weight: 500.
700 actually makes more sense: then you'd view 100-300 as light, 400-600 as medium, 700-900 as bold. But that's not how it seems to work in browsers, so I'll go with 600 as the cutoff.
Inline command activated values: "bold", "600", "700", "800", or "900"
Relevant CSS property: "font-weight"
Equivalent values: Either the two strings are equal, or one is "bold" and the other is "700", or one is "normal" and the other is "400".
createLink
commandIf the selection doesn't contain anything (meaning, e.g., deleteContents() doesn't change anything), then Chrome 12 dev inserts a link at the selection start, with the text equal to the link URL. Other browsers don't do it, so I don't either.
IE10PP2, Firefox 7.0a2, Chrome 14 dev, and Opera 11.50 all do not support indeterminate, state, or value for createLink or unlink. I previously defined indeterminate and value anyway because they make sense, but then undefined them. The nontrivial thing is what value to return if there's no link, since any string can occur as a link href, in principle.
What are the use-cases for indeterm, state, or value for createLink/unlink?
Firefox 4b11 and Chrome 11 dev both silently do nothing in this case. IE 9 RC and Opera 11 both treat the request literally. Gecko and WebKit probably have it right here: users who enter no URL are very unlikely to want to link to a relative URL resolving to the current document. If they really want to, they can always specify "#" for the value, or the author can rewrite it, so it's not like this makes the API less useful.
If value is the empty string, return false.
There are three approaches here. For instance, if you ask browsers to create a link to "http://example.org" on the "b" here:
Abc
Chrome 10 dev produces:
Abc
Firefox 4b11 produces (roughly):
Abc
(This doesn't round-trip through text/html serialization.) IE 9 RC and Opera 11 produce simply:
Abc
The last behavior probably best matches user expectations. If you happen to miss out a character when selecting the link you want to change, do you really intend to only change the link of part of it?
For each editable a
element that has an href
attribute and is an ancestor of some node effectively
contained in the active range, set that a
element's
href
attribute to value.
fontName
commandUAs differ a bit in the details here:
Setting an empty font-family has the effect of inheriting the font from the parent (although I don't see where the February 24, 2011 CSS 3 Fonts draft says that). Thus it makes sense that if we special-case this, it should be to unset the font somehow.
Special-casing the empty string to do nothing doesn't make sense to me. With createLink we'd expect the user to enter the URL themselves, so it makes sense to special-case clicking OK without entering anything. But here it's very likely that the font list will be fixed by the author (how many users will understand CSS font-family syntax?), so I don't think such usability concerns apply.
Action: Set the selection's value to value, then return true.
The value is complicated.
I'm just going to punt on this and say it should be the resolved value of font-family. I'll leave CSSOM to decide what that means if there are no applicable style rules.
Relevant CSS property: "font-family"
fontSize
commandWhat all of these have in common is that they force the author to deal with
legacy font values and don't let them use CSS. This is undesirable, but to
avoid it we'd really have to create a new command. If nothing else, the value
returned by queryCommandValue()
has to be numeric, so authors can't
really use the command sanely no matter what we do. See bug 14251.
Note that 1 is the same size as x-small in browsers, not xx-small, contrary to the CSS Fonts spec.
The entry for 7 here is an issue: there's no CSS value that corresponds to it. Even if we got one added to the drafts, it wouldn't be backward-compatible to use it. WebKit is the only engine that supports CSS output for fontSize, and it uses -webkit-xxx-large in this case, which is unworkable. Instead, we just always output a font tag for size 7. If authors want conforming markup, they'll need to give CSS sizes above size 7, not legacy sizes.
This follows Firefox 6.0a2. Chrome 14 dev always returns false. Note that indeterminacy here keys off the effective command value, while the value is based only on an approximation (a number from one to seven). Thus it's possible for every subrange of the selection to have the same value, but for the selection to still be indeterminate. Setting the fontSize to the value will make it determinate without changing anything's value.
Indeterminate: True if among formattable nodes that are effectively contained in the active range, there are two that have distinct effective command values. Otherwise false.
Chrome's behavior seems the most useful. As usual, IE returns a variable type and all other browsers return strings, and we follow other browsers.
If the selection isn't someplace editable, Chrome works like usual; some other browsers behave differently. I see no reason to behave differently.
See comment for standard inline value commands on how I decided on this choice of node.
Let pixel size be the effective command value of the first formattable node that is effectively contained in the active range, or if there is no such node, the effective command value of the active range's start node, in either case interpreted as a number of pixels.
Relevant CSS property: "font-size"
The legacy font size for an integer pixel size is returned by the following algorithm:
font
element whose size
attribute is set to returned
size.
font
element whose size
attribute is set to one plus
returned size.
foreColor
commandColor interpretations:
IE10PP2 Firefox 7.0a2 Chrome 14 dev Opera 11.50 blue blue blue #0000ff #0000ff f #f - - #f00000 #f #f - - #f00000 00f #00f - #0000ff #00000f #00f #00f rgb(0, 0, 255) #0000ff #00000f 0000ff #0000ff - #0000ff #0000ff #0000ff #0000ff rgb(0, 0, 255) #0000ff #0000ff 000000fff #0000ff - - - #000000fff #0000ff - - - rgb(0, 0, 255) rgb(0,0,255) rgb(0, 0, 255) #0000ff #00b000 rgb(0%, 0%, 100%) rgb(0,0,255) rgb(0, 0, 255) #0000ff #00b000 rgb( 0 ,0 ,255) rgb(0,0,255) rgb(0, 0, 255) #0000ff #00b000 rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.0) #ba0000 rgba(0, 0, 255, 0) rgba(0, 0, 255, 0) #00ba00 rgb(15, -10, 375) rgb(15,0,255) rgb(15, 0, 255) #0f00ff #00b015 rgba(0, 0, 0, 1) #ba0010 rgb(0, 0, 0) - #00ba00 rgba(255, 255, 255, 1) #000055 rgb(255, 255, 255) #ffffff #00ba02 rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.5) #ba0000 rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.5) rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.5) #00ba00 hsl(240, 100%, 50%) #000150 rgb(0, 0, 255) #0000ff #000024 cornsilk cornsilk cornsilk #fff8dc #fff8dc potato quiche #0000c0 - - #000a00 transparent transparent - rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) #00a000 currentColor #c0e000 currentcolor rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) #c000e0
The interpretations given for Firefox are only in styleWithCSS mode. In non-styleWithCSS mode, it just outputs the string literally as the attribute value, which can lead to different results. The given output for Chrome is for ; the output in styleWithCSS mode is the same, but rgb() is used instead of hex notation, and "transparent" and "currentcolor" are passed through under those names. IE and Opera only support to begin with.
Conclusions:
What I'm going to say is that it either has to be a valid CSS color, or
prefixing it with # must result in a valid CSS color. For ,
I'll say that the output color should be normalized to #xxxxxx form. If the
color is not a simple color (fully opaque with all channels between 0 and 255),
I'll force
style=""
even if styleWithCSS mode is off. Some of this
disagrees with all browsers, but it's unlikely to hurt and it makes sense.
TODO: Define "valid CSS color" (here and in other color places).
If value is not a valid CSS color, prepend "#" to it.
currentColor is bad for the same reason as relative font sizes. It will confuse the algorithm, and doesn't seem very useful anyway.
If value is still not a valid CSS color, or if it is currentColor, return false.
Opera 11 seems to return true for the state if there's some color style applied, false otherwise, which seems fairly useless; authors want to use value here, not state. So I'll match other browsers and not define any state.
For value, the spec essentially matches Firefox 6.0a2 and Chrome 14 dev, as far as how to decide what color the node has. IE9 seems to always return the number 0 for some bizarre reason. There are some cases where Firefox returns the empty string for some reason, and it seems to select the active node a little differently. Opera uses #xxxxxx format for getComputedStyle() but rgb() here, and also drops the transparent part of the color if there is any.
Relevant CSS property: "color"
Equivalent values: Either both strings are valid CSS colors and have the same red, green, blue, and alpha components, or neither string is a valid CSS color.
hiliteColor
commandFor historical reasons, backColor and hiliteColor behave identically.
IE 9 RC doesn't support this. It uses backColor instead, but Gecko and Opera treat that differently, while all non-IE browsers treat hiliteColor the same, so I'm standardizing hiliteColor as the way to highlight text.
This is slightly tricky, because background-color does different things on block and inline elements. Given the name ("hiliteColor"), we really only want to apply it to inline elements. This is how everyone but Gecko behaves, but Gecko sometimes applies it to blocks too. WebKit doesn't set it on non-inline elements, but does clear it and push it down from them.
The spec doesn't do any of these: background-color on non-inline elements is not touched by hiliteColor, neither created nor removed. If users want to remove the style, they need to use removeFormat. Adding it usually makes no sense; see the comment for backColor.
For color parsing, see the comment for foreColor.
See bug 13829.
currentColor is bad for the same reason as relative font sizes. It will confuse the algorithm, and doesn't seem very useful anyway. For hiliteColor you could conceive of it being useful, but it will still confuse the algorithm, so ban it for now anyway.
If value is still not a valid CSS color, or if it is currentColor, return false.
For indeterminacy, this follows no one. Firefox 6.0a2 and Chrome 14 dev both always return false. However, the spec makes sense, since it's consistent with other commands.
Relevant CSS property: "background-color"
Equivalent values: Either both strings are valid CSS colors and have the same red, green, blue, and alpha components, or neither string is a valid CSS color.
italic
commandAction: If queryCommandState("italic")
returns true,
set the selection's value to "normal". Otherwise set the
selection's value to "italic". Either way, return true.
Inline command activated values: "italic" or "oblique"
Relevant CSS property: "font-style"
removeFormat
commandSee bug, and also research by Ryosuke for WebKit.
Tested in IE 9, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 12 dev, Opera 11.00.
All elements whose default rendering is display: block are left untouched by all browsers (although IE seems to throw an exception on
It's not clear to me why we should leave alone, but everyone but Opera does. In OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, doing "Default Formatting (Ctrl+M)" doesn't remove links. In Microsoft Word 2007, doing "Clear Formatting" also doesn't remove links. Verdict: don't remove links. Apparently they don't logically qualify as "formatting".
Conclusion: IE/WebKit is a solid majority by market share and they're closely interoperable, since WebKit copied IE here. Also, it makes more sense to assume that unrecognized elements don't represent any kind of inline formatting, i.e., have a blacklist of elements to remove instead of a whitelist to keep. Thus I remove more or less the same things as IE/WebKit.
I remove blink because IE does it and it makes sense, although Chrome
doesn't; I remove abbr although only Firefox does, for consistency with
acronym; and I remove bdi and mark because they're evidently left alone only
because they're unrecognized. Finally, I remove span because otherwise,
something like
will be left intact, which isn't expected and matches no browser except IE.
(Chrome doesn't remove spans in general, but it does remove spans with style
attributes, or something like that.)
Browsers will split up all these inline elements if the selection is contained within them. Opera does strip unrecognized elements with display: block if they're within the selection, but doesn't split them up if they contain the selection.
Chrome 14 dev removes style attributes from every element in the range, but IE10PP2, Firefox 7.0a2, and Opera 11.50 do not, so I go with them. As noted above, this means I need to remove spans. I could conceivably change to remove only spans with style attributes, but it doesn't seem worth it: I'll just match Gecko.
TODO: This has to be kept in sync when new HTML elements are added. I need to figure out some way of coordinating this.
A removeFormat candidate is an editable HTML element with local name "abbr", "acronym", "b", "bdi", "bdo", "big", "blink", "cite", "code", "dfn", "em", "font", "i", "ins", "kbd", "mark", "nobr", "q", "s", "samp", "small", "span", "strike", "strong", "sub", "sup", "tt", "u", or "var".
The last sentence just prettifies the resulting range a bit.
If the active range's start node is an
editable Text
node, and its start offset is neither zero
nor its start node's length, call splitText()
on the active
range's start node, with argument equal to the active
range's start offset. Then set the active range's
start node to the result, and its start offset to zero.
Text
node, and its end offset is neither zero
nor its end node's length, call splitText()
on the active
range's end node, with argument equal to the active
range's end offset.
TODO: Splitting the parent is really a block algorithm. It's not clear whether it's desirable to use for inline nodes. Perhaps it's okay, but it makes me a little uneasy.
For each node in node list, while node's parent is a removeFormat candidate in the same editing host as node, split the parent of the one-node list consisting of node.
This step is for cases like
foo[bar]baz
, where splitting/removing tags won't help. We don't need to run superscript, since subscript does the same thing here. We run subscript first so / won't upset fontSize.For each of the entries in the following list, in the given order, set the selection's value to null, with command as given.
strikethrough
commandTODO: See underline TODO.
Action: If queryCommandState("strikethrough")
returns
true, set the selection's value to null. Otherwise set the
selection's value to "line-through". Either way, return true.
Inline command activated values: "line-through"
subscript
commandqueryCommandState("subscript")
, and let
state be the result.
Indeterminate: True if either among formattable nodes that are effectively contained in the active range, there is at least one with effective command value "subscript" and at least one with some other effective command value; or if there is some formattable node effectively contained in the active range with effective command value "mixed". Otherwise false.
For foo, Firefox 6.0a2 and Opera 11.11 say the state is true for both superscript and subscript, and indeterminate is false; Chrome 14 dev says it's true for subscript but not superscript, and indeterminate is false. We follow neither of these behaviors: we return false for both states, and say indeterminate is true. The reason is because we want to return true for a state if we'll do nothing, false if we'll do something; and if we have nesting like this, we'll always do something, namely get rid of all those ancestors and replace them with a single tag. This matches what happens in other indeterminate situations, so it's fair to consider it indeterminate.
Inline command activated values: "subscript"
superscript
commandqueryCommandState("superscript")
, and let
state be the result.
Indeterminate: True if either among formattable nodes that are effectively contained in the active range, there is at least one with effective command value "superscript" and at least one with some other effective command value; or if there is some formattable node effectively contained in the active range with effective command value "mixed". Otherwise false.
Inline command activated values: "superscript"
underline
commandTODO: There are a lot of problems with underline color and thickness, because text-decoration in CSS is horrible. These aren't prohibitive for normal use and existing browsers don't handle them either, so fixing these problems or working around them can be put off for now.
Action: If queryCommandState("underline")
returns true,
set the selection's value to null. Otherwise set the
selection's value to "underline". Either way, return true.
Inline command activated values: "underline"
unlink
commandIE 9 RC unlinks the whole link you're pointing at, while others only unlink the current text. The latter behavior seems less expected, as with createLink, although I can't articulate precisely why. Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 (Ubuntu) seem to give an option to remove the whole link or none of it, which backs the spec's requirement. See also #whatwg logs starting at 2011-05-13 at 16:53 EDT (UTC-0400).
See comment for the createLink
command about
indeterm/state/value.
a
element that has an
href
attribute and is contained in the active range or
is an ancestor of one of its boundary points.
An indentation element is either a blockquote
, or a div
that has a style
attribute that sets "margin" or some subproperty of it.
We need to allow stuff that sets border/padding because WebKit (Chrome 12 dev) sets "border: none; padding: 0px" when indenting. We need to allow stuff that sets classes because WebKit sets class="webkit-indent-blockquote". We need to allow stuff that sets dir because IE9 does. The criteria could probably be tightened up a bit to reduce false positives, but it'll do for now.
A simple indentation element is an indentation element that has no attributes except possibly
style
attribute that sets no properties other than "margin",
"border", "padding", or subproperties of those; and/or
dir
attribute.
The notions of indentation element and simple indentation element parallel those of modifiable element and simple modifiable element.
listing and xmp are included because otherwise insertParagraph inside them won't work, since paragraphs aren't an allowed child.
A non-list single-line container is an HTML element with local name "address", "div", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "listing", "p", "pre", or "xmp".
A single-line container is either a non-list single-line container, or an HTML element with local name "li", "dt", or "dd".
The block node of a node node is either a block node or null, as returned by the following algorithm:
Bug 14062. See also Mozilla bug 590640, specifically comments 48 and on.
If a command preserves overrides, then before taking
its action, the user agent must record current
overrides. After taking the action, if the active
range is collapsed
, it must restore states and
values from the recorded list.
All block commands preserve overrides except the
insertText
command, which treats overrides specially.
TODO: When breaking a non-inline element out of an inline element, like p in b or whatever, it would make sense to re-wrap the contents in the inline tag.
To fix disallowed ancestors of node:
We often run this algorithm after we move a node someplace, just in case it wound up somewhere it's not supposed to be. This avoids things like unserializable DOMs, blocks nested inside inlines, etc.
This case is really intended to handle stuff like list
items or table cells that wander outside their proper place. We generally
convert them into p
s.
If node is not an allowed child of any of its ancestors in the same editing host:
dd
or dt
, wrap the
one-node list consisting of node, with sibling
criteria returning true for any dl
with no attributes and
false otherwise, and new parent instructions returning the
result of calling createElement("dl")
on the context object. Then
abort these steps.
There's no reason to change the node to a paragraph if that won't make it an allowed child anyway.
If "p" is not an allowed child of the editing host of node, abort these steps.
Because maybe it somehow wound up as the child of a p, like via insertHTML.
Fix disallowed ancestors of node.
This algorithm implies that we don't support a sublist in the middle of an item, only at the end. For instance,
gets transformed to
which in particular creates an extra list marker for "bar". This is okay; we don't need to expose all of HTML's markup abilities through execCommand(). Similarly, the superscript and subscript commands don't allow nesting. I didn't see any way to get a sublist in the middle of an item in Word 2007 or in OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu package, nor in any browser using just execCommand(), so it should be no big problem if we require that such nesting not occur. (Existing browsers behave weirdly and inconsistently when confronted with this kind of nesting.)
The reason we need this is that otherwise it gets very confusing to figure out what happens in cases like trying to outdent
- [foo
baz
- bar]
If we first normalize, then the natural answer is something like
[foo
- bar]
- baz
but if we don't, we'd have to special-case in the toggle lists and outdent algorithms. This might be worthwhile, but it's not at all clear, and what I have works okay, so I'll stick with it for now.
TODO: Investigate fixing this.
To normalize sublists in a node item:
li
or it is not editable or
its parent is not editable, abort these steps.
ol
or ul
child:
ol
or ul
, or new item is
null and child is a Text
node whose data
consists of zero of more space characters:
createElement("li")
on the
ownerDocument
of item, then insert new item
into the parent of item immediately after
item.
The selection's list state is returned by the following algorithm:
This is just a helper to tell the state and indeterminacy of
the insertOrderedList
command and the
insertUnorderedList
command:
ol indeterm | ol state | ul indeterm | ul state | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ol | false | true | false | false |
ul | false | false | false | true |
mixed | true | false | true | false |
mixed ol | true | false | false | false |
mixed ul | false | false | true | false |
none | false | false | false | false |
ol
or
ul
, or the child of an ol
or ul
, or an allowed
child of "li".
The child-of-child case is necessary right now because of the following:
- [foo
baz
- bar]
With the current (July 2011) block-extend algorithm, this will become:
{
- foo
}baz
- bar
because of the magical li handling in block-extend. We want this to register as ol, because after normalizing sublists it will become
{
- foo
}
- bar
- baz
But the text node "foo" will wind up in node list, and is not the child of an ol. This is all very messy and has to do with questionable decisions about how to handle nested lists.
If every member of node list is either an ol
or the
child of an ol
or the child of an li
child of an ol
,
and none is a ul
or an ancestor of a ul
, return "ol".
This condition and the last are mutually exclusive, so the order is actually irrelevant. Clearly they could only both hold if no member of node list is an ol or ul, so if they both held, every member would have to be either the child of an ol and of a ul, or of an ol and an li, or a ul and an li, or of an li that's the child of both an ol and a ul. This is impossible unless the list is empty, in which case we already aborted.
If every member of node list is either a ul
or the
child of a ul
or the child of an li
child of a ul
,
and none is an ol
or an ancestor of an ol
, return "ul".
ol
or the
child or ancestor of an ol
or the child of an li
child of an ol
, and some member of node list is either a
ul
or the child or ancestor of a ul
or the child of an
li
child of a ul
, return "mixed".
ol
or the
child or ancestor of an ol
or the child of an li
child of an ol
, return "mixed ol".
ul
or the
child or ancestor of a ul
or the child of an li
child
of a ul
, return "mixed ul".
When querying the value of justify*, IE9 seems to return boolean false across the board when it doesn't throw exceptions, which it usually does in my tests. Chrome 14 dev returns the string "true" or "false" depending on state, as in other cases, which is useless. Opera 11.11 returns "" across the board. Firefox 6.0a2 behaves like with other command values: it returns "center"/"justify"/"left"/"right" depending on the active range's start node. Since this is the only behavior that's possibly useful, it's what I specced. Firefox ties the value closely to the state, returning true for the state if and only if the value matches the desired value, but this seems less useful than what I've specced for the state.
This API is based on the four-state text-align of CSS 2.1. We do some crude mapping to make it not break too badly with CSS3 values, but it's not going to work well given the design of the API.
The alignment value of a node node is returned by the following algorithm:
This is basically like the resolved value of text-align, but with two key differences. First, it only ever evaluates to center/justify/left/right, since that's the model that the justify commands work with. Second, it ignores inline elements, because text-align has no effect on them and their alignment is actually governed by their nearest block ancestor (if any).
Element
, or it is an
Element
but its "display" property has resolved value "inline" or "none",
set node to its parent.
This means there's no applicable style rule, so probably it will wind up left-aligned. Of course this ignores the fact that the alignment will really be "start", so this is wrong for RTL, but it's a pretty marginal corner case anyway. (It will only happen if, e.g., everything up to and including the html and body elements have display: inline or none.)
If node is not an Element
, return "left".
Sometimes one location corresponds to multiple distinct boundary
points. For instance, in the DOM Hello
, a boundary point might
lie at the beginning of the text node or the beginning of the element node, but
these don't logically differ much and will appear the same to the user, so we
often want to treat them the same. The algorithms here allow navigating
through such equivalent boundary points, for when we want to make the selection
as inclusive or exclusive as possible. For deletion, we want to delete as few
nodes as possible, so we move the start node forward and the end node backward.
In other cases we might do the reverse, expanding the selection. In still
other cases we might want to move forward or backward to try getting to a text
node.
Given a boundary point (node, offset), the next equivalent point is either a boundary point or null, as returned by the following algorithm:
{}
were equivalent to {}
, it
would also be equivalent to {}
. This produces very
unexpected results for nodes like
.
foo[]
is equivalent to
foo{}
, which is equivalent to foo{}
. However, foo{}
is not equivalent to
foo
{}
– the cursor might look like it's in a visibly
different position.
{}foo
is equivalent to
{}foo
, which is equivalent to
[]foo
. As noted before, though, we don't descend into
empty nodes. And again, {}foo
is different from
{}foo
.
Given a boundary point (node, offset), the previous equivalent point is either a boundary point or null, as returned by the following algorithm:
The first equivalent point of a boundary point (node, offset) is returned by the following algorithm:
The last equivalent point of a boundary point (node, offset) is returned by the following algorithm:
A boundary point (node, offset) is a block
start point if either node's parent is null and
offset is zero; or node has a child with index
offset − 1, and that child is either a
visible block node or a visible br
.
A boundary point (node, offset) is a block end point if either node's parent is null and offset is node's length; or node has a child with index offset, and that child is a visible block node.
A boundary point is a block boundary point if it is either a block start point or a block end point.
When a user agent is to block-extend a range range, it must run the following steps:
Generally, block commands work on any block that contains part of the selection, even if the selection doesn't include the whole block. This algorithm takes an input range, copies it, stretches out the copy to contain entire blocks, and returns the result. Then the caller will normally use it instead of the range it started with. For instance, if the cursor is collapsed in a text node inside a paragraph, this will generally return a range that includes the whole paragraph.
Two bits of magic worth noting. First,
counts as
a block delimiter here, since it looks the same as a block boundary (assuming
no margin etc.) and this is a visual API. We include the
as part of the line that precedes it. Second, if the
selection is inside an , this will extend it to
include the whole
. This latter point is weird, and
I should re-examine it sometime, but it seems to work.
li
, set
start offset to the index of the last such li
in
tree order, and set start node to that li
's parent.
This just changes something like foo] foo]
to {
.
While start offset is zero and start node's parent is not null, set start offset to start node's index, then set start node to its parent.
li
, set
end offset to one plus the index of the last such li
in
tree order, and set end node to that li
's parent.
A node node follows a line break if the following algorithm returns true:
A node node precedes a line break if the following algorithm returns true:
To record current overrides:
When restoring, some commands can interfere with others. Specifically, we want to restore createLink before foreColor and underline, and subscript and superscript before fontSize. TODO: This approach only works for default styles (although I'm not sure offhand how we could handle non-default styles in principle).
Firefox 7.0a2 and Opera 11.50 don't honor createLink with collapsed selections. If you insert text, it's not linked. The spec follows Chrome 14 dev. IE9 also ignores createLink with collapsed selections, but its behavior in other cases for collapsed selections is totally different from all other browsers, so it's not a fair comparison.
If there is a value override for "createLink", add ("createLink", value override for "createLink") to overrides.
Firefox 7.0a2 and Opera 11.50 will honor repeated subscript/superscript commands on a collapsed selection, allowing you to nest them. The spec follows the general philosophy that we don't allow users to nest subscript/superscript, so the last one wins. Chrome 14 dev is similar to the spec.
For each command in the list "bold", "italic", "strikethrough", "subscript", "superscript", "underline", in order: if there is a state override for command, add (command, command's state override) to overrides.
To record current states and values:
Thus we will set state overrides based on the first
formattable node, to match values. This means that if you have
foo[barbaz] fooa[]
and hit backspace and hit A, you'll get
, although bold was previously indeterminate.
This is needed to match the behavior of hitting A straight away, since
innerText doesn't strip wrappers when it invokes "delete the contents".
For each command in the list "bold", "italic", "strikethrough", "subscript", "superscript", "underline", in order: if node's effective command value for command is one of its inline command activated values, add (command, true) to overrides, and otherwise add (command, false) to overrides.
Special case for fontSize, because its values are weird.
Add ("fontSize", node's effective command value for "fontSize") to overrides.
This is wrong: it will convert non-pixel sizes to pixel sizes. But I don't see any way to avoid it. Hopefully it won't come up too often. font-size is a real problem, because the mapping from specified value to computed value is lossy and not fully defined (e.g., how many px is "small"?).
To restore states and values specified by a list overrides returned by the record current overrides or record current states and values algorithm:
queryCommandState(command)
returns something different from override, take the
action for command, with value equal to
the empty string.
queryCommandValue(command)
returns something not equivalent to
override, take the action for command,
with value equal to override.
This special case is needed because createLink has no value.
Otherwise, if override is a string; and command is "createLink"; and either there is a value override for "createLink" that is not equal to override, or there is no value override for "createLink" and node's effective command value for "createLink" is not equal to override: take the action for "createLink", with value equal to override.
The override will be some CSS value, so we have to convert it to a legacy font size.
Otherwise, if override is a string; and command is "fontSize"; and either there is a value override for "fontSize" that is not equal to override, or there is no value override for "fontSize" and node's effective command value for "fontSize" is not loosely equivalent to override:
If we took the action for a command, we need to reset
node, because it might have changed. For instance, if the
selection was foo[bar]baz
, the text node could have been split so
that the first part is now outside the active range.
Set node to the first formattable node effectively contained in the active range, if there is one.
TODO: Consider what should happen for block merging in corner cases like display: inline-table.
To delete the selection, given a block merging flag that defaults to true, a strip wrappers flag that defaults to true, and a string direction that defaults to "forward":
The idea behind this algorithm is self-explanatory, but the details wind up being remarkably complicated.
First, any editable nodes inside the selection will be deleted, and the
selection will be collapsed. By way of contrast, effectively
contained tries to expand the range to include as much as possible, so
[foo] foo
contains the . What we do here is contract
the range to include as little as possible, so
{
contains
only foo
and doesn't delete the paragraph.
After that, if the selection originally started and ended in different
blocks, and the block merging flag is true, the end block will get
merged into the start block. This is needed so if the user selects text on
several lines and deletes it, the text immediately that was before the
selection winds up on the same line as the text immediately after it. For
example, fo[o fo[]ar
becomes
.
This procedure winds up being tricky, and takes up a large chunk of the logic.
Tables are a notable special case. If an entire table is contained in the range, it will be deleted. If it's anything less, only the contents of the cells will be deleted and the table structure will be left intact.
The strip wrappers flag controls what happens if the deletion
removes all the contents of an inline element. If wrappers are being stripped,
the empty inline element will be removed: this is usually what you want,
because the user can't position the selection inside it. But callers like
the insertText
command that intend to
immediately insert new contents want to leave the wrappers, so the new contents
are wrapped by the same thing as the old.
Even if strip wrappers is true, the algorithm will set a state override and value override for any styles it winds up removing. This way, if the user deletes a wrapper that adds a style (or link for that matter), then types something, the new text will get the style from the old text.
This is a selection like
foo[]bar
, where the boundary points are
equivalent but not identical. We just collapse it and abort, since there's
nothing to delete.
collapseToStart()
on the
context object's selection.
collapseToEnd()
on the context object's
selection.
Text
node and start offset
is 0, set start offset to the index of start node,
then set start node to its parent.
Text
node and end offset is
its length, set end offset to one plus the index of
end node, then set end node to its parent.
The previous two steps are so that we won't leave empty text nodes anywhere.
collapse(start node, start offset)
on
the context object's selection.
extend(end node, end offset)
on the
context object's selection.
When we delete a selection that spans multiple blocks, we merge the end block's contents into the start block, like
fo[o
b]ar->fo[]ar
.
We figure out what the start and end blocks are before we start deleting anything.
We only merge to or from block nodes or editing hosts. (This is just in
case someone makes a span into an editing host and sticks paragraphs inside
it or something . . . we could probably drop that proviso.) Firefox 7.0a2
ignores the display property when merging, so it doesn't merge but does merge
.
This is undesirable, because it's visually wrong. IE10PP2 and Chrome 14 dev
behave more like the spec, and Opera 11.50 seems to be unable to make up its
mind.
If span isn't an allowed child, it's probably something unpleasant like a table row or a list or such. We don't want to merge to or from something like that, because we'd most likely wind up with the wrong type of child somewhere. It should be pretty hard for this to happen given the normalization we do on the selection; I'm not actually sure how it could happen at all, actually, unless you start out with a DOM that has non-allowed children someplace. So it's basically a sanity check.
We don't let either start block or end block be a td or th. This means we'll never merge to or from a td or th. This matches Firefox 5.0a2, and reportedly Word as well. Chrome 13 dev and Opera 11.11 allow merging from a non-table cell end block to a table cell start block, but not vice versa. In IE9 the delete key just does nothing.
If start block is neither a block node nor an
editing host, or "span" is not an allowed child of
start block, or start block is a td
or th
, set
start block to null.
td
or th
, set
end block to null.
Later on we'll restore overrides. This ensures that if we delete inline formatting elements and the user then types something, the typed text will have the same style as before.
As far as I can tell, IE9 and Opera 11.50 don't do this at all. If you delete a selection and then start typing, the new text doesn't take on the styles of the old text.
Firefox 7.0a2 seems to do it for some styles but not others. Strikethrough, superscript, subscript, and links seem to be lost, at a minimum.
The spec goes with something like Chrome 14 dev, which tries to preserve lots of stuff.
Record current states and values, and let overrides be the result.
Now we actually begin deleting things.
This whole piece of the algorithm is based on deleteContents() in DOM Range, copy-pasted and then adjusted to fit.
If start node and end node are the same, and
start node is an editable Text
node:
deleteData(start offset, end offset
− start offset)
on start node.
collapseToStart()
on the
context object's selection.
collapseToEnd()
on the context object's
selection.
This is needed to restore any overrides that would otherwise be lost. TODO: In this and similar cases, we could optimize by saving only overrides, not the full state/value.
Restore states and values from overrides.
Text
node, call
deleteData()
on it, with start offset as the first argument and
(length of start node − start offset) as
the second argument.
IE9 doesn't seem to let you do any intercell deletions: the delete key does nothing if you select across multiple cells. Firefox 5.0a2 and Opera 11.11 behave as the spec says, not removing any table things. Chrome 13 dev will remove entire rows if selected. Note that IE, Firefox, Word 2007, and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu all switch to a magic cell-selection mode when you try to select between cells, at least in some cases, instead of selecting letter-by-letter.
For each node contained in the active range,
append node to node list if the last member of
node list (if any) is not an ancestor of node;
node is editable; and node is not a
thead
, tbody
, tfoot
, tr
, th
, or td
.
Do this before stripping wrappers: see bug 13831.
If the block node of parent has no
visible children, and parent is
editable or an editing host, call
createElement("br")
on the context object and append the result as
the last child of parent.
Taking insertText to test the case where strip wrappers
is false, with value a: [foobar]baz a[]baz a[]baz foo[barbaz] fooa[] fooa[]
becomes
per spec, in IE9, and in Chrome 14 dev. Firefox 7.0a2
and Opera 11.50 make it
, with a useless wrapper.
becomes
per spec
and in IE9 and Firefox 7.0a2 and Opera 11.50; in Chrome 14 dev apparently
it initially becomes
, but then the style is recreated.
This is detectable if you do something weird like instead of
: it comes
or such. I follow IE9 in all
cases, because it makes the most sense.
If strip wrappers is true or parent is not an inclusive ancestor of start node, while parent is an editable inline node with length 0, let grandparent be the parent of parent, then remove parent from grandparent, then set parent to grandparent.
Even if strip wrappers is false, we still want to strip wrappers that aren't inclusive ancestors of start node. The idea of not stripping wrappers is that we're going to insert new content right afterward, like text or an image, but that new content will be inserted at the start node. Wrappers in other places still need to be removed, because they would otherwise remain empty.
Text
node, call
deleteData(0, end offset)
on it.
Now we need to merge blocks. The simplest case is something like
fo[o
bar
b]az
->fo
{}az
->fo{}az
where neither block descends from the other. More complicated is something like
foo[]bar
-> foo[]bar
or
foo[
]bar ->foo[]bar
where one descends from the other.
collapseToStart()
on the
context object's selection.
collapseToEnd()
on the context object's
selection.
We might have added a br to the start/end block in an earlier step. Now we're about to merge the blocks, and we don't want the br's to get in the way. The end block is being destroyed no matter what. If the start block winds up empty after merging, we'll add a new br child at the end so it doesn't collapse.
If start block has one child, which is a collapsed block prop, remove its child from it.
Just repeatedly blow up the end block in this case.
If start block is an ancestor of end block:
collapse()
on the context object's selection, with
first argument start block and second argument the index of
reference node.
previousSibling
and nextSibling
are both inline nodes, call
createElement("br")
on the context object and insert it into
end block's parent immediately after end block.
firstChild
is not an inline
node, restore states and values from record,
then abort these steps.
br
, and
children's last member's nextSibling
is an inline
node, append children's last member's nextSibling
to
children.
previousSibling
is an
editable br
, remove that br
from its parent.
In this case, pull in everything that comes after start block, until we hit a br or block node.
Otherwise, if start block is a descendant of end block:
collapse()
on the context object's selection, with
first argument start block and second argument start
block's length.
nextSibling
is an inline
node and start block's lastChild
is a br
, remove
start block's lastChild
from it.
nextSibling
is neither null nor a
block node, append it to nodes to move.
br
and its last member's nextSibling
is neither null nor a
block node, append its last member's nextSibling
to
nodes to move.
In the last case, just move all the children of the end block to the start block, and then get rid of any elements we emptied that way.
Otherwise:
collapse()
on the context object's selection, with
first argument start block and second argument start
block's length.
firstChild
is an inline node
and start block's lastChild
is a br
, remove start
block's lastChild
from it.
We might have deleted the contents between two lists, in which case we should merge them. See bug 13976.
ol
in
the same editing host whose nextSibling
is also an ol
in
the same editing host, or an inclusive ancestor ul
in the
same editing host whose nextSibling
is also a ul
in the
same editing host:
nextSibling
are not both ol
s
in the same editing host, and are also not both ul
s
in the same editing host, set ancestor to its
parent.
nextSibling
has children, append
ancestor's nextSibling
's firstChild
as the last
child of ancestor, preserving ranges.
nextSibling
from its parent.
createElement("br")
on the context object and append the result as the
last child of start block.
To split the parent of a list node list of consecutive sibling nodes:
This algorithm breaks up the parent of node list. If they're the only children of their parent, the parent is removed entirely. If there are preceding or following siblings, the original parent is left intact as the parent of those siblings. If there are both preceding and following siblings, the original parent is left as the parent of the following siblings and a clone is used for the parent of the preceding siblings.
We make sure not to disrupt the appearance any more than necessary.
Obviously margins or such on the parent will be lost, but the children will not
wind up on the same line as anything they weren't already on the same line as.
E.g., if we split the parent of "bar" in barfoo
, we get foo
, not
barfoobar
. (This is amazingly complicated and error-prone.)
We don't preserve inline styles: callers that want to do that should call
record the values and restore the values themselves.
All this is useful in a lot of situations, like for outdenting. For inline formatting commands, we almost always rely on pushing down values instead, since that often leads to tidier markup.
TODO: We insert things after the parent. This is bad, because it will cause them to become part of any ranges that immediately follow. For instance, if we're hitting "bar" in
{foo
bar
baz}
it becomes
{foo
bar
baz}
instead of
foo
bar{
baz}
because of how range mutation rules work. This doesn't happen if we insert before. This may or may not be important enough to bother working around.
If the first child of original parent is not in node list, but its last child is:
createElement("br")
on the context object and
insert the result immediately after the last member of node
list.
cloneNode(false)
on original parent.
id
attribute, unset it.
previousSibling
of the first member of node
list is not null, append the first child of original
parent as the last child of cloned parent,
preserving ranges.
Notice that a boundary point that was immediately before the element will now be immediately before its children, just because of the regular range mutation rules, without needing to worry about preserving ranges. Likewise for boundary points immediately after the element, if we wind up removing the element in the final step. Preserving ranges is only necessary for the sake of boundary points in the element or its descendants.
For each node in node list, insert node into the parent of original parent immediately before original parent, preserving ranges.
createElement("br")
on the context object and
insert the result immediately before the first member of node
list.
br
, and the first child of original parent is
a br
, and original parent is not an inline node,
remove the first child of original parent from original
parent.
createElement("br")
on the context object and
insert the result immediately after the last member of node
list.
The parent might be null if it's a br that we removed in the last step, in which case this step isn't necessary.
If node list's last member's nextSibling
is null,
but its parent is not null, remove extraneous line breaks at the
end of node list's last member's parent.
To remove a node node while preserving its descendants, split the parent of node's children if it has any. If it has no children, instead remove it from its parent.
Whitespace in HTML normally collapses. However, if the user hits the space bar twice in an HTML editor, they expect to see two spaces, not one. Even if they hit the space bar once at the beginning or end of a line, it would collapse without special handling. The only good solution here is for the author to set white-space: pre-wrap on the editable area, and on everywhere the content is reproduced. But if they don't, we have to painfully hack around the problem.
This is a basically intractable problem because of the unfortunate
confluence of three factors. One, our characters are Unicode, and Unicode
doesn't know about whitespace collapsing, so it provides no special characters
to control it. Two, HTML itself provides no features that control whitespace
collapsing without undesired side effects (like inhibiting line breaks or not
being allowed inside ). Three, we need to support
user agents that don't reliably support CSS, since that includes many popular
mail clients.
The upshot is we have no good way to control whitespace collapse, so we rely
on the least bad way available:
. This doesn't
collapse with adjacent whitespace in browsers, which is good. But it also
doesn't allow a line break opportunity, which is bad. In any run of whitespace
that we don't want to collapse, any two regular spaces must be separated by an
so they don't collapse together, but we need to
carefully limit runs of consecutive
s to minimize
the damage to line-breaking behavior.
The result is an elaborate and meticulously-crafted hodgepodge of bad compromises that frankly isn't worth the effort to explain here. The saving grace is that it all gets disabled if white-space is set to pre-wrap as it should be, so authors can opt out of the insanity. Interested readers will find detailed rationale for the exact sequences required in the comments.
See long comment before insertText.
The canonical space sequence of length n, with boolean flags non-breaking start and non-breaking end, is returned by the following algorithm:
To canonicalize whitespace at (node, offset), given an optional boolean argument fix collapsed space that defaults to true:
First we go to the beginning of the current whitespace run.
Repeat the following steps:
TODO: Following a line break is unlikely to be the right criterion.
Otherwise, if start offset is zero and start node does not follow a line break and start node's parent is in the same editing host, set start offset to start node's index, then set start node to its parent.
Text
node and its
parent's resolved value for "white-space" is neither "pre" nor "pre-wrap"
and start offset is not zero and the (start offset
− 1)st code unit of start node's data
is a space
(0x0020) or non-breaking space (0x00A0), subtract one from start
offset.
Now we collapse any consecutive spaces, if fix collapsed space is true.
Let end node equal start node and end offset equal start offset.
This tries to delete spaces at the beginning of a line (bug 14119).
Let collapse spaces be true if start offset is zero and start node follows a line break, otherwise false.
TODO: Preceding a line break is unlikely to be the right criterion.
Otherwise, if end offset is end node's length and end node does not precede a line break and end node's parent is in the same editing host, set end offset to one plus end node's index, then set end node to its parent.
Text
node and its
parent's resolved value for "white-space" is neither "pre" nor "pre-wrap"
and end offset is not end node's length and the
end offsetth code unit of end node's data
is a
space (0x0020) or non-breaking space (0x00A0):
data
is a space (0x0020): call
deleteData(end offset, 1)
on end node, then
continue this loop from the beginning.
data
is a space (0x0020),
false otherwise.
We've already stripped leading whitespace, and collapsed consecutive spaces. Now we try to strip any collapsed trailing whitespace (bug 14119 again).
If fix collapsed space is true, then while (start node, start offset) is before (end node, end offset):
Text
node and its
parent's resolved value for "white-space" is neither "pre" nor "pre-wrap"
and end offset is end node's length and the last
code unit of end node's data
is a space (0x0020) and
end node precedes a line break:
deleteData(end offset, 1)
on end node.
Finally we replace with the canonical sequence.
Let replacement whitespace be the canonical space
sequence of length length. non-breaking start
is true if start offset is zero and start node
follows a line break, and false otherwise. non-breaking
end is true if end offset is end node's
length
and end node precedes a line break, and
false otherwise.
Text
node or if
start offset is start node's length, set
start offset to one plus start node's index, then
set start node to its parent.
data
:
We need to insert then delete, so that we don't change range boundary points. TODO: switch to using "replace data" now that DOM Core has defined that.
Call insertData(start offset, element)
on
start node.
deleteData(start offset + 1, 1)
on
start node.
There are two basically different types of indent/outdent: lists, and
everything else. For lists we'll wrap the item in a nested list to indent, and
split its parent to outdent. For
everything else we'll wrap in a to indent,
and try breaking it out of an ancestor indentation element to
outdent.
Indenting winds up being pretty simple: just add an appropriate wrapper.
There's not really anything to think about here except which wrapper we want
(
or
or ), and establishing that is not rocket science.
Outdenting is considerably more complicated. The basic idea we follow is to first find the nearest editable ancestor that's a list or indentation element. If we succeed, and the node we're trying to outdent is the only descendant of the ancestor, of course we can just remove the ancestor and that's that. Otherwise, what we do is remove the ancestor and then indent all its other descendants, much like pushing down values.
But of course, there are complications. We don't always actually want to
remove the closest ancestor that's causing indentation. For one
thing, we prefer ancestors that we can remove completely, i.e., simple indentation elements. When
outdenting
, removing the inner tag
would result in foo
, since we don't want to lose the
id. Thus we prefer to remove the outer tag and wind up with
.
foo
Also, if the node we're outdenting is itself a list, we prefer to remove an ancestor indentation element rather than the list. Otherwise, if the user selected some text, indented it, then added a list, there would be no way to remove the indentation without removing the list first. This way, the user could remove the list with the appropriate list-toggling command or remove the indentation with the outdent command.
We have to handle entire lists of siblings at once, or else we'd wind up doing something like
{
->- foo
}
- bar
->
- foo
- bar
- foo
- bar
since by the time we got to doing the
To indent a list node list of consecutive sibling nodes:
ol
or ul
:
This matches IE9, Firefox 4.0, and Chrome 12 dev. If there's a preceding
- foo
baz
- bar
in which case it's unclear what we should do if the user selects "foo" and indents. I've filed a bug on HTML5.
Wrap node list, with sibling criteria
returning true for an HTML element with local name
tag and false otherwise, and new parent
instructions returning the result of calling
createElement(tag)
on the ownerDocument
of first
node.
Firefox 4.0 respects the CSS styling flag for indent, but Chrome 12 dev does not. I always produce blockquotes, even if CSS styling is on, for two reasons. One, IE9 handles inline margin attributes badly: when outdenting, it propagates the margin to the parent, which doesn't actually remove it. Two, in CSS mode I'd want to use
The top/bottom margins might be undesirable here, but no more so than for
/etc. Here as there, authors can remove them with CSS if they want.
blockquote indents on both sides, so we don't have to worry about directionality. In theory it would be better if we indented only on the start side, but that requires care to get right in mixed-direction cases. Even once browsers start to support margin-start and so on, we can't use them because a) we have to work okay in legacy browsers and b) it doesn't help if a descendant block has different direction (so should be indented the other way). So let's not worry about it: most browsers don't, and the ones that do get it wrong. Just indent on both sides.
Wrap node list, with sibling criteria
returning true for a simple indentation element and false
otherwise, and new parent instructions returning the result of
calling createElement("blockquote")
on the ownerDocument
of first
node. Let new parent be the result.
Things that are produced for indentation that we need to consider removing:
(produced by spec, Firefox 4.0 non-CSS, Opera 11.00)
and(IE9)
(Chrome 12 dev)
For discussion on the list-related stuff, see the comment for insertOrderedList.
Gecko in CSS mode just adds margin properties to random elements that are lying around. We don't attempt to remove those, because 1) the amount and position of the margin can vary (it increases the margin if there's a preexisting one), so it's potentially complicated, and 2) no browser removes such margins on outdent, including Gecko, except for Gecko in CSS mode. TODO: Consider removing it anyway.
To outdent a node node:
The easy case is when the whole element is indented. In this case we remove the whole thing indiscriminately. In the case of blockquotes created by IE, this might change the direction of some children, but then their direction was probably changed incorrectly in the first place, so no harm.
If node is a simple indentation element, remove node, preserving its descendants. Then abort these steps.
This might be a simple indentation element that had style added to it by Firefox in CSS mode, for instance (color, font-family, etc.).
If node is an indentation element:
dir
attribute of node, if any.
Approximate algorithms when an ancestor is causing the indentation appear to be:
with those same attributes. This is an excellent idea in general, but unfortunately it preserves explicitly-specified margins in style attributes, which isn't great. In other cases, it moves the stuff to be outdented outside. Not clear on all the details, seems to be pretty confusing. Also does a bunch of seemingly arbitrary normalization like removing divs and some attributes from some things . . .
Overall, all flawed, so I'll make up my own, patterned after pushing down styles. First we search ancestors for a simple indentation element, which we stand a chance of completely removing. Failing that, we look for an indentation element that's not simple, so we can't completely remove it.
Let current ancestor be node's parent.
Element
that is neither a simple indentation element nor an ol
nor a
ul
, append current ancestor to ancestor list and
then set current ancestor to its parent.
When asked to outdent a list wrapped in a simple indentation element, Chrome 12 dev removes the list instead of the simple indentation element. Opera 11.10 seems to remove both. IE9 and Firefox 4.0 remove the simple indentation element, as does the spec.
If node is an ol
or ul
and current ancestor
is not an editable indentation element:
reversed
, start
, and type
attributes of node, if any are
set.
We can't turn it into a div if it's the child of an ol or ul, because that's not allowed: there's no way to group li's (see HTML bug 13128).
If node has attributes, and its parent is not an ol
or ul
, set the tag name of node to "div".
If we get to this point, we have an ancestor to split up.
Append current ancestor to ancestor list.
We can't outdent it yet, because we need its children to remain intact for the loop.
Let original ancestor be current ancestor.
br
, and its nextSibling
is a br
, remove target's
nextSibling
from its parent.
This is the action for the insertOrderedList
command and the insertUnorderedList
command, which behave identically except for which list type they
target. It does several things that vary contextually.
If everything in the selection is contained in the target list type already, this more or less just outdents everything one step. This is relatively simple.
Otherwise, it's slightly more complicated:
First, any lists of the opposite list type (other tag name) get converted to the target list type (tag name). They get merged into a sibling if appropriate, otherwise we set the tag name.
Then we go through all the affected nodes, handling each run of consecutive
siblings separately. Any line that's not already wrapped in an gets wrapped. If the parent at this point isn't a list at
all, the run gets wrapped in a list. If it's the wrong type of list, we
split the parent and rewrap it in the right type of list. That's
basically it, except that we have to exercise the usual care to try merging
with siblings and so forth.
Research for insertOrderedList/insertUnorderedList: tested the following command sequences in IE9, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 12 dev, Opera 11.10, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu package, Microsoft Office Word 2007. The commands "ol", "ul", "indent", "outdent" correspond in browsers to "insertOrderedList", "insertUnorderedList", "indent", and "outdent"; in OO.org to "Numbering On/Off", "Bullets On/Off", "Increase Indent", "Decrease Indent"; and in Word to "Numbering", "Bullets", "Increase Indent", "Decrease Indent".
Note: OO has a bunch of extra options, like "Promote One Level", "Demote One Level", "Promote One Level With Subpoints", "Demote One Level With Subpoints", "Insert Unnumbered Entry", "Restart Numbering". The regular "Increase/Decrease Indent" commands work oddly, and I assume they're not really meant to be used inside lists. Thus I also tested with "Promote One Level" and "Demote One Level". These are denoted by OO' instead of OO.
Assume that there are style rules in effect like
ol ol { list-style-type: lower-alpha } ol ol ol { list-style-type: lower-roman }
This is the default appearance in Word, and I set OO to something similar with Bullets and Numbering → Outline in the list editing toolbox. I'm ignoring bullet style throughout, for no particular reason.
barbaz:
foo
bar
baz
instead, same as Chrome.foo
bar
baz
foo:
bar
baz
, same as Word/OO/Firefox/Chrome.foo
bar
baz
foobaz:
bar
foo
bar
baz, indent "bar" and "baz" and put "1" before each.
foo
bar
baz, same as Chrome.
foo
bar
baz, indent "baz", put a "1" before "bar" and a "2" before "baz".
.
, or two steps with either (same behavior regardless with two steps).
foobaz:
- bar
Ignoring the conceptual model of HTML, which users won't understand, here's the conceptual model I've developed for lists: text is divided up into blocks. Each block has an indentation level and a list marker type. The list marker type can be either nothing, ordered, or unordered. A list block cannot have indentation level less than one. Any given piece of text is part of only one block. A block may be visually non-contiguous, such as if a single list block is interrupted by a further-indented block.
To find the right number (or letter) for an ordered-list block, look at the immediately preceding block, but skip over any blocks of higher indentation level. If there is no immediately preceding block, or it's not an ordered-list block, or it has a lower indentation level, the number is 1 (or a, i, etc.). Otherwise, it's the number of the preceding block plus one.
ol/ul commands change the selected block to that list marker type, or remove the list marker type if it's already the chosen type. If the block has indentation level zero, it increases to one.
indent/outdent commands change the selected block's indentation level. If a list block's indentation level is reduced to zero, it's converted to a regular block.
What this means from an HTML perspective, roughly:
Sheesh, lists are complicated.
To toggle lists, given a string tag name (either "ol" or "ul"):
li
s that are
inclusive ancestors of the active range's start
and/or end node.
TODO: This overnormalizes, but it seems like the simplest solution for now.
For each item in items, normalize sublists of item.
Convert it to the right name. If possible, we want to merge with a neighboring list of the correct type. Failing that, we set the tag name.
If list's previousSibling
or nextSibling
is an
editable HTML element with local name tag
name:
We exclude indentation elements so that selecting some random text and doing indent followed by insertOrderedList will have the same result as the reverse. Specifically,
[foo]->
- [foo]
per spec and Firefox 4.0 and (more or less) Chrome 12 dev. Opera 11.10 instead does
For each node node contained in new range,
if node is editable; the last member of node
list (if any) is not an ancestor of node;
node is not an indentation element; and either
node is an ol
or ul
, or its parent is an ol
or
ul
, or it is an allowed child of "li"; then append
node to node list.
We don't want to touch these. E.g., assuming tag name is "ol",
[foobaz] ->
- bar
not
- [foo
- bar
- baz]
.
- [foo
- bar
- baz]
But
If mode is "enable", remove from node list any
ol
or ul
whose parent is not also an ol
or ul
.
nextSibling
of the last member of
sublist and is not an HTML element with
local name tag name, remove the first member from node
list and append it to sublist.
Accumulate consecutive sibling nodes in sublist, first converting them all to li's (except if they're already lists).
While either sublist is empty, or node list is
not empty and its first member is the nextSibling
of
sublist's last member:
Thus
foo
becomesfoo
If node list's first member is a p
or div
,
set the tag name of node list's first member to
"li", and append the result to sublist. Remove the first
member from node list.
li
or ol
or ul
, remove it from node list and append it to
sublist.
nextSibling
of
nodes to wrap's last member and the first member of
node list is an inline node and the last member
of nodes to wrap is an inline node other than a
br
, remove the first member from node list and append it
to nodes to wrap.
createElement("li")
on the context object. Append the result to
sublist.
In this case it's already wrapped properly, nothing more to do.
If sublist's first member's parent is an HTML
element with local name tag name, or if every member
of sublist is an ol
or ul
, continue this loop from the
beginning.
createElement(tag name)
on the context object.
Special case: something like
- foo
[bar]
becomes
- foo
- [bar]
instead of
- foo
.
- [bar]
We handle the special case in new parent instructions instead of outside because we'd prefer to wind up in a sibling if there is one. We handle only previousSibling, not nextSibling, because we really mean for this to cover something like
[foobar]
which we'll handle node-by-node. TODO: Maybe we should do this differently, like just special-case simple indentation elements in an earlier part of the algorithm? This way's a bit weird.
If sublist's first member's parent is not an
editable simple indentation element, or
sublist's first member's parent's previousSibling
is
not an editable HTML element with local name
tag name, call createElement(tag name)
on the
context object and return the result.
previousSibling
.
lastChild
.
lastChild
is not an editable
HTML element with local name tag name, call
createElement(tag name)
on the context object, and
append the result as the last child of list.
This is the action for the four justify*
commands. It's pretty straightforward, with no notable
gotchas or special cases. It works more or less like a stripped-down version
of set the selection's value, except it gets to be much simpler
because it's much less general. (It's not similar enough to just invoke that
algorithm: too many things differ between block and inline elements.)
There are two basic ways this works in browsers: using the align attribute, and using CSS text-align. IE9 and Opera 11.11 use only the align attribute, Chrome 13 dev uses only text-align, and Firefox 5.0a2 varies based on styleWithCSS. The two ways produce entirely different results, which is a real problem, so I don't think Firefox's approach is tenable. text-align is more valid, and for typical contenteditable cases it works the same. But for cases where you have fixed-width blocks, like tables or just divs with a width set, it behaves differently, and in those cases the align attribute is more useful.
TODO: text-align doesn't behave as expected if there are descendant blocks with non-100% width, like tables. The align attribute behaves a lot more nicely in such cases, but it's not valid. Not clear what to do. For now I've stuck with text-align, just because the cases where it misbehaves can't be created by any sequence of stock execCommand()s that I know of, but this needs more careful consideration. Gecko in CSS mode seems to special-case tables, adding auto margins to the table element to get it to align correctly.
TODO: We could do something along the lines of pushing down values here, although no browser does. In fact, it's very likely this can be rewritten in terms of the inline formatting command primitives, but it's not clear if it would be worth the added complexity.
To justify the selection to a string alignment (either "center", "justify", "left", or "right"):
No browser actually removes center, but it makes sense to do so.
Let element list be a list of all editable
Element
s contained in new range that either has an
attribute in the HTML namespace whose local name is "align", or has
a style
attribute that sets "text-align", or is a center
.
style
attribute.
div
or span
or center
with no attributes, remove it,
preserving its descendants.
center
with one or more attributes, set the tag name of
element to "div".
This could theoretically be necessary, like if it converted "
Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
Of tested browsers, only Chrome 13 dev seems to not apply the alignment to nodes that are already aligned. Even then, it does apply it if the alignment is just inherited from the root.
For each node node contained in new range, append node to node list if the last member of node list (if any) is not an ancestor of node; node is editable; node is an allowed child of "div"; and node's alignment value is not alignment.
nextSibling
of the last member of
sublist, remove the first member of node list and
append it to sublist.
Wrap sublist. Sibling criteria
returns true for any div
that has one or both of the following two
attributes and no other attributes, and false otherwise:
align
attribute whose value is an ASCII
case-insensitive match for alignment.
style
attribute which sets exactly one CSS property (including
unrecognized or invalid attributes), which is "text-align", which is set
to alignment.
As with inline formatting, I only ever create new elements, and don't ever modify existing ones. This doesn't match how any browser behaves in this case, but for inline formatting it matches everyone but Gecko's CSS mode, so I'm just being consistent.
New parent instructions are to call createElement("div")
on the context object, then set its CSS property "text-align" to
alignment and return the result.
When the user inserts whitespace immediately following something
that looks like a URL or e-mail address, we automatically run the createLink
command on it.
An autolinkable URL is a string of the following form:
IE9 and LibreOffice 3.3.4 both have a whitelist of URL schemes. That would be complicated and involve political decisions, so instead, we'll just accept anything that looks like a hierarchical URL scheme. Google Docs is similar (as of November 9, 2011), but it's too lax, and allows characters in the scheme that can't be in a scheme. For non-hierarchical schemes, we just whitelist mailto:, since it's the only common one that makes sense to autolink.
Either a string matching the scheme pattern from RFC 3986 section 3.1
followed by the literal string ://
, or the literal string
mailto:
; followed by
We don't try to enforce that the URL is anything resembling valid per spec. Too complicated for not enough gain.
Zero or more characters other than space characters; followed by
If the user types a URL followed by some punctuation, we still want to autolink, but we don't want to include the punctuation if it's probably not meant as part of the URL.
IE9 excludes !#&()*+,-.:;<=?@[]^_`{|}~
as
trailing characters from both URLs and e-mails. A trailing "
or
>
will prevent autolinking, and a trailing $%'/\
is
included in the link.
LibreOffice 3.3.4 excludes trailing !”#'()*+,.:;<=>?[\]^_`{|}~
,
and prevents autolinking on $%&-@
. It includes a trailing
/
in URLs, but it inhibits linking for e-mails.
Google Docs (as of November 9, 2011) is complicated. Trailing
”’,-.
always prevents autolinking of a URL, and trailing
#%/?_
is always included in a URL. Trailing !&=$()*+:;<>@[\]^`{|}~
prevent autolinking if there's no
?
before them, but are included in the URL if there is a ?
.
For e-mails, _
is included, and everything else prevents
autolinking.
None of these behaviors makes maximal sense. We should exclude characters
if they're more likely as delimiters than actual trailing characters; include
them if they're more likely as actual trailing characters; and prevent
autolinking if their presence suggests that we're not actually looking at a
link or e-mail address. The lists I made up for URLs are: exclude trailing
!"'(),-.:;<>[]`{}
, include anything else. For e-mail,
exclude anything at all.
A character that is not one of the ASCII characters !"'(),-.:;<>[]`{}
.
To autolink (node, end offset):
Text
node, or has an a
ancestor,
do nothing and abort these steps.
data
whose end is end offset and that contains no
space characters.
data
ending at
end offset that is an autolinkable URL, decrement
end offset.
data
that is an autolinkable URL
ending at end offset.
data
starting at start offset and ending at end offset.
data
ending at
end offset that is a valid e-mail
address, decrement end offset.
data
that is a valid
e-mail address ending at end offset.
data
starting at start offset and ending
at end offset.
delete
commandThis is the same as hitting backspace (see Additional requirements). The easy part is if the selection isn't collapsed: just delete the selection. But it turns out rich-text editors have a lot of special behaviors for hitting backspace with a collapsed selection. Most obviously, if there's a text node right before the cursor (maybe wrapped in some inline elements), we delete its last character. But some of the special cases we run into are:
gets removed if you backspace while the cursor is right
after it, so the link disappears.
or
or ![]()
gets deleted.
or
or
that's at the beginning of a
list, outdents the current block (rather than merging with the previous
block).
For all the deletions here, Firefox 7.0a2 will remove wrapper elements like only if they're selected, like {foo}. IE9, Chrome 14 dev, and Opera 11.50 will all remove them even if only their contents are selected, like [foo]. Gecko's behavior in the latter case leaves things like {} in the DOM, which is unhelpful, so I don't.
collapsed
, delete
the selection and return true.
Needed so that if there are multiple consecutive spaces we backspace over all at once.
Canonicalize whitespace at the active range's start.
First go up as high as possible within the current block, then drill down to the lowest possible level, in the hopes that we'll wind up at the end of a text node, or maybe in a br or hr.
Repeat the following steps:
If there's an invisible node somewhere, Firefox 5.0a2 removes that node and then stops, so each backspace removes one invisible node. All others remove the invisible node and then continue on looking for something visible to remove. The spec follows the latter behavior, since it makes more sense to the user. Of course, the definition of "invisible node" is not necessarily anything like the spec's.
If offset is zero and node's previousSibling
is an editable invisible node, remove
node's previousSibling
from its parent.
When backspacing a link, Firefox 7.0a2, Chrome 14 dev, Opera 11.50, and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu have no special behavior. IE9 and Word 2007 remove the link instead of deleting its last character. The latter behavior seems more useful and intuitive.
Otherwise, if node has a child with index
offset − 1 and that child is an editable
a
, remove that child from node, preserving its
descendants. Then return true.
br
or an img
, set node to that
child, then set offset to the length of
node.
At this point, node cannot be an invisible node. There are three cases:
Unlike forwardDelete, there's no special case for diacritics. This means backspacing will just delete the last combining diacritic typed, or the whole character if it's precomposed. This matches everything I tested (IE9, Firefox 7.0a2, Chrome 14 dev, etc.).
If node is a Text
node and offset is not zero,
or if node is a block node that has a child with
index offset − 1 and that child is a br
or
hr
or img
:
collapse(node, offset)
on the
context object's selection.
extend(node, offset − 1)
on the
context object's selection.
At the time of this writing, this should be impossible. Just being safe.
If node is an inline node, return true.
If we're at the beginning of a list, we want to outdent the first list item. This doesn't actually match anyone or anything. Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu just remove the list marker, which is weird and doesn't map well to HTML. Browsers tend to just merge with the preceding block, which isn't expected.
If node is an li
or dt
or dd
and is the first
child of its parent, and offset is zero:
li
s that are
ancestors of node.
Annoying hack to prevent the dl from being re-added when fixing disallowed ancestors. In most cases we want a wrapper dl added, but in two cases (delete and insertParagraph) we're actually trying to outdent the list item. TODO: there might be a better way to do this.
If node is a dd
or dt
, and it is not an
allowed child of any of its ancestors in the same
editing host, set the tag name of node to
the default single-line container name and let node
be the result.
By this point, we're almost certainly going to merge something, and the only question is what.
Let start node equal node and let start offset equal offset.
At the beginning of an indented block, outdent it, similar to a list item. Browsers don't do this, word processors do. Note: this copy-pastes from the outdent command action.
If offset is zero, and node has an editable inclusive ancestor in the same editing host that's an indentation element:
This is to avoid stripping a line break from
foo
[]bar |
and similarly for
If the child of start node with index start
offset is a table
, return true.
If you try backspacing into a table, select it. This doesn't match any browser; it matches the recommendation of the "behavior when typing in contentEditable elements" document. The idea is that then you can delete it with a second backspace.
If start node has a child with index start
offset − 1, and that child is a table
:
collapse(start node, start offset
− 1)
on the context object's selection.
extend(start node, start offset)
on the
context object's selection.
Special case:
foo
[]bar
->foo
[]bar
and likewise for
foo
[]bar
->foo
[]bar.
Browsers don't do this consistently. Firefox 5.0a2 doesn't seem to do it at all.
If offset is zero; and either the child of start
node with index start offset minus one is an hr
, or
the child is a br
whose previousSibling
is either a br
or not
an inline node:
collapse(start node, start offset
− 1)
on the context object's selection.
extend(start node, start offset)
on the
context object's selection.
collapse(node, offset)
on the
selection.
If you try backspacing out of a list item, merge it with the previous item, but add a line break. Then you have to backspace again if you really want them to be on the same line. This matches Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu, and also matches "behavior when typing in contentEditable elements", but does not match any browser.
Note that this behavior is quite different from what happens if you actually select the linebreak in between the two lines. In that case, the blocks are merged as normal.
Also note that hitting backspace twice will merge with the previous item. This matches OO.org, but Word will outdent the item on subsequent backspaces. Word's behavior doesn't fit well with the way lists work in HTML, and we probably don't want it.
If the child of start node with index start
offset is an li
or dt
or dd
, and that child's
firstChild
is an inline node, and start offset is
not zero:
If the last child is already a br, we only need to append one extra br. Otherwise we need to append two, since the first will do nothing.
If previous item's lastChild
is an inline
node other than a br
, call createElement("br")
on the
context object and append the result as the last child of
previous item.
lastChild
is an inline
node, call createElement("br")
on the context object and
append the result as the last child of previous item.
When merging adjacent list items, make sure we only merge
the items themselves, not any block children. We want
foo []bar foo []bar foo foo[]bar
to become
, not
or
[]bar
. To do the
deletion, we need to wipe out the current selection, so we save it as a
range. Saving it as a node/offset pair isn't enough, because it might be
invalid after we do the deletion. A range will update according to the range
mutation rules.
If start node's child with index start
offset is an li
or dt
or dd
, and that child's
previousSibling
is also an li
or dt
or dd
:
cloneRange()
on the active range, and let
original range be the result.
nextSibling
.
collapse(start node, start offset)
on
the context object's selection.
extend(node, 0)
on the context object's
selection.
removeAllRanges()
on the context object's selection.
addRange(original range)
on the context object's
selection.
General block-merging case.
While start node has a child with index start offset minus one:
collapse(start node, start offset)
on
the context object's selection.
extend(node, offset)
on the
context object's selection.
formatBlock
commandThis command lets you change what block element particular lines are wrapped in. It will convert an existing wrapper if one exists, and otherwise will create a new one.
A formattable block name is "address", "dd", "div", "dt", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "p", or "pre".
Tested browser versions: IE9, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 13 dev, Opera 11.10.
Firefox and Chrome will replace a
by aor other given tag. IE and Opera will nest the
inside instead. The latter makes more sense, given that a) we don't support formatBlock with
and b)s are logically different, since they can contain many lines.Firefox will not convert other tags like
to
, it will only wrap unwrapped lines in a. Firefox also won't replaceby things like, it will nest the
inside. The spec follows other browsers.
If you try to convert a
- to a
oror such, Firefox breaks out of the
entirely, leaving ...
. Chrome will convert a- or
- to the given element, leaving a
oror such as the child of a
. I follow IE/Opera, which only affect the contents of
- /
- (Firefox behaves this way for
- as well, just not
- ). This means you can get invalid DOMs like
- , but they can be serialized as text/html, so I'm not too fussy.
foo
When it comes to
- , IE/Opera behave like with
- /
- , which is how I behave too. Firefox apparently refuses to do anything. Chrome tries to wrap the parent list element, breaking it up if only some of the children are selected; this produces unserializable DOMs if you're wrapping with
.
When you're converting multiple blocks at once, Chrome replaces them all by one block with
stuck in, likefoo
bar
->foo. It wipes out intervening block containers too in some cases. This might make sense for /
bar/ , but other browsers don't do it.
IE9 requires the brackets. If they're not provided, it does nothing.
If value begins with a "<" character and ends with a ">" character, remove the first and last characters from it.
- Let value be converted to ASCII lowercase.
Opera 11.10 throws NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR for bad elements, all other tested browsers ignore the input. Testing in IE9, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 13 dev, and Opera 11.10, supported elements seem to be:
- Everyone
- address, div, h*, p, pre
- Everyone but IE
- blockquote
- Everyone but Opera
- dd, dt
- IE only
- dir, menu, ol, ul
- Firefox and Chrome only
- dl
- Chrome only
- article, aside, footer, header, hgroup, nav, section
HTML5 as of May 2011 supports: address, article, aside, blockquote, div, footer, h*, header, hgroup, nav, p, pre, section, which exactly matches Chrome except minus dd/dt/dl.
See mailing list discussion on the subject.
If value is not a formattable block name, return false.
- Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
- Let node list be an empty list of nodes.
- For each node node contained in new range, append node to node list if it is editable, the last member of original node list (if any) is not an ancestor of node, node is either a non-list single-line container or an allowed child of "p" or a
dd
ordt
, and node is not the ancestor of a prohibited paragraph child.- Record the values of node list, and let values be the result.
This tries to avoid misnesting if only some lines of an element are selected, so
[foo]
becomes
bar[foo]
bar
instead of[foo]
bar or such. It tries to heuristically distinguish between divs used as line-breakers and divs used as actual wrappers by checking if they have prohibited paragraph children as descendants. It works for address too, in case there are paragraphs nested inside. Thus [foo]
bar becomes[foo]
bar, but [foo]bar
becomes[foo]
bar
. Likewise, we don't break things out of lists or tables or such if they happen to be nested in a.For each node in node list, while node is the descendant of an editable HTML element in the same editing host, whose local name is a formattable block name, and which is not the ancestor of a prohibited paragraph child, split the parent of the one-node list consisting of node.
- Restore the values from values.
We have two different behaviors, one for div and p and one for everything else. The basic difference is that for div and p, we assume that it should be one line per element, while for other elements, we put in multiple lines separated by
. So if you do formatBlock to p onfoobaror
foo
baryou get
foo
bar
but formatBlock to h1 will get you
foo
.
barIE9 will just change the elements as they are, so it gives
foo
bar
andfoo
bar
forfoobar, butfoo
and
barfoo
for foo
bar
bar. This is unreasonable, because the two possible inputs here look identical to the user and might have been produced by identical user input.Firefox 5.0a2 will give results like
foo
bar
orfoo
bar
no matter what (modulo oddities in its handling of divs). Opera 11.10 is similar, except it leaves a trailing
in the first element.Chrome 13 dev will give results like
foo
or
barfoo
no matter what.
barThe specced behavior is a compromise between the existing behaviors, predicated on the fact that
foo
bar
almost never makes sense, andfoo
isn't usually what's wanted either.
barWhile node list is not empty:
- If the first member of node list is a single-line container:
If you try to format a single-line container with no children, IE10PP2 inserts an nbsp before formatting. (It uses nbsp instead of
to make blocks not collapse, so the equivalent for us would be to insert a
.) Firefox 7.0a2 and Opera 11.50 make the element disappear. Chrome 14 dev leaves it alone and doesn't format it. I follow Firefox/Opera just because it's the simplest given how I happen to have written the spec, and it's a corner case, so exact behavior isn't important.For blocks that contain only a collapsed whitespace node, IE10PP2 and Firefox 7.0a2 convert them like normal. Chrome 14 dev and Opera 11.50 leave it alone and don't format it. I go with the majority, which is again simpler to spec.
Let sublist be the children of the first member of node list.
- Record the values of sublist, and let values be the result.
- Remove the first member of node list from its parent, preserving its descendants.
- Restore the values from values.
- Remove the first member from node list.
- Otherwise:
- Let sublist be an empty list of nodes.
- Remove the first member of node list and append it to sublist.
- While node list is not empty, and the first member of node list is the
nextSibling
of the last member of sublist, and the first member of node list is not a single-line container, and the last member of sublist is not abr
, remove the first member of node list and append it to sublist.- Wrap sublist. If value is "div" or "p", sibling criteria returns false; otherwise it returns true for an HTML element with local name value and no attributes, and false otherwise. New parent instructions return the result of running
createElement(value)
on the context object. Then fix disallowed ancestors of the result.- Return true.
Firefox 6.0a2 throws, Chrome 14 dev always returns false, Opera 11.11 doesn't support indeterm to start with, IE9 was uncooperative in testing so I'm not sure what it does. I'm speccing it just because it makes sense.
- If the active range is null, return the empty string.
- Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
- Let node list be all visible editable nodes that are contained in new range and have no children.
- If node list is empty, return false.
- Let type be null.
- For each node in node list:
- While node's parent is editable and in the same editing host as node, and node is not an HTML element whose local name is a formattable block name, set node to its parent.
- Let current type be the empty string.
- If node is an editable HTML element whose local name is a formattable block name, and node is not the ancestor of a prohibited paragraph child, set current type to node's local name.
- If type is null, set type to current type.
- Otherwise, if type does not equal current type, return true.
- Return false.
IE9 returns human-readable strings like "Normal" (p/div/etc.), "Formatted" (pre), "Heading 1" (h1), etc. Firefox 6.0a2 and Chrome 14 dev both return the appropriate tag name in lowercase, or the empty string if there is no appropriate tag. Opera 11.11 behaves the same, but with uppercase.
IE9 looks like it recognizes address, h*, pre, dd, dt, ol, ul, and dir, with everything else registering as "Normal". Firefox 6.0a2 recognizes only the arguments it accepts for formatBlock, namely address, h*, p, and pre. Chrome 14 dev recognizes address, div, h*, dd, dl, dt, p, pre plus lots of random other stuff like blockquote and section. I'll go with everything that execCommand("formatblock") accepts as an argument, which at the time of this writing means what Firefox supports plus div.
- If the active range is null, return the empty string.
- Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
- Let node be the first visible editable node that is contained in new range and has no children. If there is no such node, return the empty string.
Opera 11.11 doesn't require it be editable, so it will return "DIV" instead of "" for
foo.While node's parent is editable and in the same editing host as node, and node is not an HTML element whose local name is a formattable block name, set node to its parent.
Chrome 14 dev will report "div" for
or such. Opera 11.11 reports "". IE and Firefox didn't cooperate with testing. Opera makes more sense, and matches the fact that formatBlock now doesn't recognize such a div as a formatBlock candidate, so Opera it is.
- foo
We don't really need to specify "editable" here, since it has to be editable if we got to this point.
If node is an editable HTML element whose local name is a formattable block name, and node is not the ancestor of a prohibited paragraph child, return node's local name, converted to ASCII lowercase.
- Return the empty string.
The
forwardDelete
commandThis is the same as hitting the delete key (see Additional requirements). It behaves much the same as the
delete
command, except of course backwards. Also, some of the special cases for backspacing don't apply, as noted in the comments. The one special case you get when deleting forward but not backward is that if the cursor is before a grapheme cluster that consists of multiple characters, like a base character with combining diacritics, we delete the diacritics too. (Backspacing just deletes the last diacritic, so you have to backspace several times to remove the whole cluster.)Copy-pasted from delete, see there for comments.
- If the active range is not
collapsed
, delete the selection and return true.- Canonicalize whitespace at the active range's start.
- Let node and offset be the active range's start node and offset.
- Repeat the following steps:
- If offset is the length of node and node's
nextSibling
is an editable invisible node, remove node'snextSibling
from its parent.- Otherwise, if node has a child with index offset and that child is an editable invisible node, remove that child from node.
- Otherwise, if offset is the length of node and node is an inline node, or if node is invisible, set offset to one plus the index of node, then set node to its parent.
No special link behavior for forwardDelete here, unlike delete.
Otherwise, if node has a child with index offset and that child is neither a block node nor a
br
nor animg
nor a collapsed block prop, set node to that child, then set offset to zero.- Otherwise, break from this loop.
- If node is a
Text
node and offset is not node's length:
- Let end offset be offset plus one.
Firefox 7.0a2, Chrome 14 dev, Word 2007, and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Ubuntu act as the spec says, getting rid of all diacritics on forward delete. IE9 and Opera 11.50 have no special case and just delete the next character. I go with Firefox/Chrome/Word/OO.
However, when I actually type in the text box as opposed to running semi-automated tests, IE9 has magical behavior: it replaces the base character with something that looks like ◌ U+25CC DOTTED CIRCLE. Further strikes of the delete key remove the diacritics, and the circle vanishes along with the last of them. I wasn't able to get it to actually replace the base character, so I'm not sure what the point is. The circle doesn't seem to appear in the DOM, and apparently it disappears in some circumstances. This might be worth standardizing somehow, I don't know.
TODO: The way we remove diacritics is probably not right. We probably want to normalize to grapheme cluster boundaries, using UAX#29 or something. We also need to handle non-BMP stuff. The idea is that if the cursor is before a character that precedes a combining mark, you need to delete the combining mark too.
While end offset is not node's length and the end offsetth code unit of node's
data
has general category M when interpreted as a Unicode code point, add one to end offset.- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(node, end offset)
on the context object's selection.- Delete the selection.
- Return true.
- If node is an inline node, return true.
- If node has a child with index offset and that child is a
br
orhr
orimg
, but is not a collapsed block prop:
- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(node, offset + 1)
on the context object's selection.- Delete the selection.
- Return true.
No special list-item behavior for forwardDelete here, unlike delete.
Let end node equal node and let end offset equal offset.
- If end node has a child with index end offset, and that child is a collapsed block prop, add one to end offset.
- Repeat the following steps:
No special indentation element behavior for forwardDelete here, unlike delete.
If the child of end node with index end offset minus one is a
table
, return true.- If the child of end node with index end offset is a
table
:
- Call
collapse(end node, end offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(end node, end offset + 1)
on the context object's selection.- Return true.
Note, any br will do here: a br immediately after a block is always significant.
If offset is the length of node, and the child of end node with index end offset is an
hr
orbr
:
- Call
collapse(end node, end offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(end node, end offset + 1)
on the context object's selection.- Delete the selection.
- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the selection.- Return true.
No special list-item behavior for forwardDelete here, unlike delete.
- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(end node, end offset)
on the context object's selection.- Delete the selection.
The
indent
command
- IE9
- Outputs
, or when surrounding RTL blocks,. The direction seems to go by the end of the selection. The presence of the dir attribute means that any contents that were inheriting a different dir from an ancestor get their direction changed as a side effect, but if they actually have the opposite dir specified, they won't appear to be indented. It doesn't reset top or bottom margins on the blockquote, so it adds them. If it's not wrapping a block element, like if it's only wrapping up until a
, it adds a.
- Firefox 4.0
- In styleWithCSS mode, adds style="margin-left: 40px" to the appropriate block container (or margin-right if it's RTL). If there's no appropriate block container, adds a div. If multiple blocks are affected, it goes by the direction of the block whose style it's changing, which winds up being wrong for descendants with different direction. In non-styleWithCSS mode, uses
, so it indents on both sides and also adds top/bottom margins.- Chrome 12 dev
- Outputs
in both modes for both LTR and RTL (which is broken for RTL, since it indents only on the left).- Opera 11.00
- Outputs
, so it indents on both sides and on the top/bottom.For repeated indentation, everyone except Opera that outputs
s just puts them at the outermost possible location, which works well. Opera puts them in the innermost position, which is broken, because it will even put them inside(which will not round-trip through text/html serialization).
Gecko in CSS mode messes up by adding margins even to things like
that already have margins from CSS rules, instead of nesting a div, so it doesn't actually increase the indentation. However, if an element has an explicit left margin (assuming LTR), it will increase the margin to 80px, so it works with WebKit's blockquotes.We have two strategies for handling directionality: always indent on both sides (Firefox non-CSS, Opera) or try to figure out heuristically which side we want (IE, Firefox CSS). The latter approach is only possible by adding extra markup and complexity, so for now we'll take the easy way out and go with just indenting on both sides.
This reasoning doesn't discuss lists. For research on lists, see the comment for insertOrderedList. List handling is more complicated and I wound up differing from all browsers in lots of ways.
- Let items be a list of all
li
s that are inclusive ancestors of the active range's start and/or end node.TODO: This overnormalizes, but it seems like the simplest solution for now.
For each item in items, normalize sublists of item.
- Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
- Let node list be a list of nodes, initially empty.
- For each node node contained in new range, if node is editable and is an allowed child of "div" or "ol" and if the last member of node list (if any) is not an ancestor of node, append node to node list.
Without this step, the last child of the previous sibling might be a list, which the li wouldn't get appended to.
If the first visible member of node list is an
li
whose parent is anol
orul
:
- Let sibling be node list's first visible member's
previousSibling
.- While sibling is invisible, set sibling to its
previousSibling
.- If sibling is an
li
, normalize sublists of sibling.- While node list is not empty:
- Let sublist be a list of nodes, initially empty.
- Remove the first member of node list and append it to sublist.
- While the first member of node list is the
nextSibling
of the last member of sublist, remove the first member of node list and append it to sublist.- Indent sublist.
The
insertHorizontalRule
commandYou'd think interop here would be simple, right? Nope: we have three different behaviors across four browsers. Opera 11.00 is the only one that acts more or less like the spec. IE9 and Chrome 12 dev treat the value as an id, which is weird and probably useless, so I don't do it. Firefox 4.0 produces
instead of
, which is also weird and almost definitely useless, so I don't do it. Then you have the varying behavior in splitting up parents to ensure validity . . .
- Let start node, start offset, end node, and end offset be the active range's start and end nodes and offsets.
- While start offset is 0 and start node's parent is not null, set start offset to start node's index, then set start node to its parent.
- While end offset is end node's length, and end node's parent is not null, set end offset to one plus end node's index, then set end node to its parent.
- Call
collapse(start node, start offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(end node, end offset)
on the context object's selection.- Delete the selection, with block merging false.
- If the active range's start node is neither editable nor an editing host, return true.
We don't want to call insertNode at the start or end of a text node, because that will leave an empty text node.
If the active range's start node is a
Text
node and its start offset is zero, callcollapse()
on the context object's selection, with first argument the active range's start node's parent and second argument the active range's start node's index.- If the active range's start node is a
Text
node and its start offset is the length of its start node, callcollapse()
on the context object's selection, with first argument the active range's start node's parent, and the second argument one plus the active range's start node's index.- Let hr be the result of calling
createElement("hr")
on the context object.- Run
insertNode(hr)
on the active range.IE9 and Chrome 13 dev seem to never break up any ancestors, which can lead to unserializable DOMs like
inside. Opera 11.11 seems to always break up parents going all the way up to the contenteditable root, even ones like
that can contain
. Firefox 5.0a2 acts the most sensibly: it only breaks up things likeor that shouldn't contain
. The spec goes with Firefox here (although the list of what to break up isn't precisely identical).Fix disallowed ancestors of hr.
- Run
collapse()
on the context object's selection, with first argument hr's parent and the second argument equal to one plus hr's index.- Return true.
The
insertHTML
commandNot supported by IE9. Handling of disallowed children is interesting:
- Firefox 5.0a2
- Will allow
- inside
- (doesn't serialize). If you try inserting dir/ol/ul inside an existing dir/ol/ul, it will strip the list element and leave only the li's, so inserting
into
- abc
creates
- f[o]o
.
- f
- abc
- o
- /
- /
- that don't descend from a list will be left alone, not converted to
. Empty elements seem not to be inserted.
- will get put inside
, which breaks serialization. Nothing is allowed inside
, not even text. - Chrome 13 dev
- Inserting a
into a
or
- or such will remove the child
, adding its contents to the parent instead. Adding an
- or
as the child of aworks, as does an inside an ,
inside
,
- inside
- ,
inside , inside , etc. (all unserializable). But - and
- seem to get converted to their contents like
.
inside
- abc
becomes
- f[o]o
, interestingly (note the empty
- f
- abc
- o
- ). I don't understand how it works, but it doesn't seem to make much sense.
- Opera 11.11
- Seems to do almost no validity or serialization checks, except that it prevents inside ,
inside , and block elements inside inline elements. Interestingly, most of the places where it's non-serializable per HTML parsing are actually serializable in Opera's own parser.
Chrome 14 dev and Opera 11.11 do this even if the value is empty. Firefox 5.0a2 throws an exception.
Firefox 7.0a2 and Chrome 14 dev do strip wrappers here, so inserting HTML in the place of [foo] will remove the . Opera 11.50 keeps the wrappers. I follow the majority and leave the "strip wrappers" flag true.
- If the active range's start node is neither editable nor an editing host, return true.
TODO: This has some interesting consequences. For instance, table cells and similar will just vanish if they're not in an appropriate place; and inside a script or style or xmp or such, the argument will effectively be HTML-escaped before use. Some of these consequences might be undesirable.
Let frag be the result of calling
createContextualFragment(value)
on the active range.- Let last child be the
lastChild
of frag.Firefox 5.0a2 also seems to not add empty elements like , but Chrome 13 dev and Opera 11.11 do.
If last child is null, return true.
- Let descendants be all descendants of frag.
This is so we don't get something like
[foo]->{}->Some HTML{}
with an extra bogus line break at the end.
If the active range's start node is a block node:
- Let collapsed block props be all editable collapsed block prop children of the active range's start node that have index greater than or equal to the active range's start offset.
- For each node in collapsed block props, remove node from its parent.
We could canonicalize whitespace after inserting the fragment, but let's not. If the author wants HTML, give them HTML behavior. When asked to replace a paragraph's contents with a single space, Firefox 7.0a2 does so but inserts a
before it (not after); Chrome 14 dev does so and doesn't insert a
, so the paragraph collapses; Opera 11.50 doesn't insert the space at all, and just inserts a
. Correct behavior is to insert a space, then insert a
after it in the next step because it's an invisible node.Call
insertNode(frag)
on the active range.In case we remove all the contents, then remove the extra
, then only add a comment or something. In that case we want to re-add the extra
. We don't try fixing the actual inserted content: that's the author's lookout.If the active range's start node is a block node with no visible children, call
createElement("br")
on the context object and append the result as the last child of the active range's start node.Need to do this before fixing disallowed ancestors, since otherwise the last child might have been removed (e.g., it's an li).
Call
collapse()
on the context object's selection, with last child's parent as the first argument and one plus its index as the second.We want to fix all descendants, not just children. Consider
, for example.- foo
Fix disallowed ancestors of each member of descendants.
- Return true.
The
insertImage
command
Similar logic to createLink, except even more compelling, since an HTML document linking to itself as an image is just silly. In fact, the current HTML spec instructs UAs to not even try displaying the image, and just fail immediately if the URL is empty. Firefox 4b11 silently does nothing on an empty string, but the other three browsers I tested stick in the
anyway.
If value is the empty string, return false.
Firefox 7.0a2 seems to strip the wrapper or not depending on the exact positioning of the selection: {foo} yes, [foo] no. Chrome 14 dev seems to strip the wrapper regardless. Opera 11.50 seems to keep the wrapper, but place the image outside it. I didn't get IE to cooperate with my tests. I chose to leave wrappers across the board because they might be meaningful: e.g., a background-color when the image is small or not fully opaque.
Delete the selection, with strip wrappers false.
- Let range be the active range.
- If the active range's start node is neither editable nor an editing host, return true.
Same logic as with insertHTML.
If range's start node is a block node whose sole child is a
br
, and its start offset is 0, remove its start node's child from it.- Let img be the result of calling
createElement("img")
on the context object.No alt text, so it's probably invalid. This matches all browsers.
Run
setAttribute("src", value)
on img.This winds up putting it at the original start point of the active range, as currently specced. This matches IE9 and Firefox 5.0a2. Chrome 13 dev puts it at the end point, and Opera 11.11 puts it in between (where the range would collapse if you called deleteContents()).
Run
insertNode(img)
on range.- Let selection be the result of calling
getSelection()
on the context object.- Run
collapse()
on selection, with first argument equal to the parent of img and the second argument equal to one plus the index of img.- Return true.
The
insertLineBreak
commandThis is the same as hitting Shift-Enter or such (see Additional requirements). It deletes the selection, and replaces it with a
. No real complications.
Only implemented in WebKit (Chrome 14 dev). Other tests are entirely manual (i.e., actually hitting Shift-Enter instead of running a command). There's a surprisingly large amount of interop.
IE9 is tripped up by
, and also often doesn't add an extra
when the one it just inserted is extraneous.Firefox 6.0a2 doesn't notice if you're trying to put the
in a bad place, which can result in unserializable DOMs.Chrome 14 dev inserts a literal linebreak for pre and xmp and maybe other similar elements. This doesn't seem very useful, so I don't bother.
Opera 11.11 isn't heedful of
, and treats somewhat oddly.
IE9 doesn't strip wrappers (IE10PP2 didn't work in tests). Firefox 7.0a2 strips wrappers inconsistently depending on the exact selection endpoints. Chrome 14 dev strips wrappers but recreates any styles using new wrappers. Opera 11.50 strips all wrappers.
Delete the selection, with strip wrappers false.
- If the active range's start node is neither editable nor an editing host, return true.
script, xmp, table, . . .
If the active range's start node is an
Element
, and "br" is not an allowed child of it, return true.- If the active range's start node is not an
Element
, and "br" is not an allowed child of the active range's start node's parent, return true.We don't want to call insertNode at the start or end of a text node, because that will leave an empty text node.
If the active range's start node is a
Text
node and its start offset is zero, callcollapse()
on the context object's selection, with first argument equal to the active range's start node's parent and second argument equal to the active range's start node's index.- If the active range's start node is a
Text
node and its start offset is the length of its start node, callcollapse()
on the context object's selection, with first argument equal to the active range's start node's parent and second argument equal to one plus the active range's start node's index.- Let br be the result of calling
createElement("br")
on the context object.- Call
insertNode(br)
on the active range.- Call
collapse()
on the context object's selection, with br's parent as the first argument and one plus br's index as the second argument.- If br is a collapsed line break, call
createElement("br")
on the context object and let extra br be the result, then callinsertNode(extra br)
on the active range.- Return true.
The
insertOrderedList
commandAction: Toggle lists with tag name "ol", then return true.
Firefox 6.0a2 sort of supports this, but it throws exceptions most of the time. It has the quirk that even if there are no ol's around, it will say it's indeterminate if there are some things that are ul's and some that are not lists at all, but this doesn't make sense and I don't duplicate it. No one else supports indeterminate for insert*List, but it makes sense if you support state.
Indeterminate: True if the selection's list state is "mixed" or "mixed ol", false otherwise.
IE9 throws exceptions in most cases, Firefox 6.0a2 in some cases as well, for no apparent reason. Ignoring those, the spec basically matches all browsers, except with a few weird random mismatches that looked like browser bugs to me.
State: True if the selection's list state is "ol", false otherwise.
The
insertParagraph
commandThis is the same as hitting enter (see Additional requirements). The general rule is that we find the nearest single-line container ancestor, clone it and insert the clone after it, and then move all the contents after the cursor (along with the cursor itself) to the clone. But there are a few special cases:
- If we can't find a single-line container to use, first we wrap the current line in a new container with the default single-line container name.
- For
,
, and
, we add a
instead of cloning it. These are all elements that are meant to contain multiple lines, not have one line per element.
- If the cursor is in a list item with no contents, hitting enter breaks out of the list entirely, outdenting the current item. This means that if you're in a list, you can hit enter twice to break out.
- If the cursor is at the end of a heading, hitting enter doesn't make a new heading, it switches to the default single-line container name.
- If the cursor is at the end of a
or
, the new element is the opposite type, so you naturally switch between entering terms and definitions.
There are three major behaviors here. Firefox 5.0a2 behaves identically to execCommand("formatBlock", false, "p"), which is not really useful. IE9 actually just overwrites the selection with an empty paragraph element, which seems not very useful either. Chrome 13 dev and Opera 11.10 behave basically the same as if the user hit the Return key. This latter behavior seems much more useful, even though it's horribly misnamed, so it's what I'll spec. Comments about IE/Firefox are based on manual tests, where I hit Enter instead of running commands.
(Actually, Opera doesn't behave quite the same for insertParagraph and line breaks. But it's pretty close, and I expect the differences are bugs.)
Then, of course, we have several flavors of line-breaking behavior to choose from. Firefox prefers
s, unless it's in the middle of aor something. Opera and IE like
. Chrome prefers
. And there are lots of subtleties besides. I go with IE/Opera-style behavior, as discussed in a whatwg thread.
- Delete the selection.
- If the active range's start node is neither editable nor an editing host, return true.
- Let node and offset be the active range's start node and offset.
- If node is a
Text
node, and offset is neither 0 nor the length of node, callsplitText(offset)
on node.- If node is a
Text
node and offset is its length, set offset to one plus the index of node, then set node to its parent.- If node is a
Text
orComment
node, set offset to the index of node, then set node to its parent.- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the context object's selection.- Let container equal node.
- While container is not a single-line container, and container's parent is editable and in the same editing host as node, set container to its parent.
If container is an editable single-line container in the same editing host as node, and its local name is "p" or "div":
We add the default wrapper in this case.
If container is not editable or not in the same editing host as node or is not a single-line container:
- Let tag be the default single-line container name.
- Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
- Let node list be a list of nodes, initially empty.
- Append to node list the first node in tree order that is contained in new range and is an allowed child of "p", if any.
- If node list is empty:
Ideally, we should normalize things so that the cursor is never in a weird place after deletion, but let's be safe and bail out if we do hit this scenario. It's not clear if we need this line in the long term, but at the time of this writing there's at least one corner case where deleting can leave the cursor inside a
. If tag is not an allowed child of the active range's start node, return true.
- Set container to the result of calling
createElement(tag)
on the context object.- Call
insertNode(container)
on the active range.- Call
createElement("br")
on the context object, and append the result as the last child of container.- Call
collapse(container, 0)
on the context object's selection.- Return true.
TODO: It is not at all obvious that this is the correct list of nodes in all cases. It should probably work because of how the block-extend algorithm works, but further thought would be good.
While the
nextSibling
of the last member of node list is not null and is an allowed child of "p", append it to node list.- Wrap node list, with sibling criteria returning false and new parent instructions returning the result of calling
createElement(tag)
on the context object. Set container to the result.IE9 and Chrome 13 dev just break
up into multiples. Firefox 5.0a2 and Opera 11.10 insert a
instead, treating it differently from. The latter makes more sense. What might make the most sense is to just insert an actual newline character, though, since this is a pre after all . . .
IE9 and Chrome 13 dev also break
up into multiple es. Firefox 5.0a2 inserts
instead. Opera 11.10 nestss inside. I don't like Opera's behavior, because it means we nest formatBlock candidates inside one another, so I'll go with Firefox.
listing and xmp work the same as pre in all browsers. For Firefox and Opera, this results in trying to put a br inside an xmp, so I go with IE/Chrome for xmp.
TODO: In cases where hitting enter in a header doesn't break out of the header, we should probably follow this code path too, instead of creating an adjoining header. No browser does this, though, so we don't.
If container's local name is "address", "listing", or "pre":
- Let br be the result of calling
createElement("br")
on the context object.- Call
insertNode(br)
on the active range.- Call
collapse(node, offset + 1)
on the context object's selection.Necessary because adding a br to the end of a block element does nothing if there wasn't one there already. A single newline immediately preceding a block boundary does nothing.
If br is the last descendant of container, let br be the result of calling
createElement("br")
on the context object, then callinsertNode(br)
on the active range.- Return true.
Including dt/dd here follows Firefox 5.0a2, as with the special dt/dd handling below.
If container's local name is "li", "dt", or "dd"; and either it has no children or it has a single child and that child is a
br
:
- Split the parent of the one-node list consisting of container.
- If container has no children, call
createElement("br")
on the context object and append the result as the last child of container.Annoying hack to prevent the dl from being re-added when fixing disallowed ancestors. In most cases we want a wrapper dl added, but in two cases (delete and insertParagraph) we're actually trying to outdent the list item. TODO: there might be a better way to do this.
If container is a
dd
ordt
, and it is not an allowed child of any of its ancestors in the same editing host, set the tag name of container to the default single-line container name and let container be the result.- Fix disallowed ancestors of container.
- Return true.
- Let new line range be a new range whose start is the same as the active range's, and whose end is (container, length of container).
We don't want the start to be just inside a node, because if it is, we'll leave behind an empty element either in the new or old container. Empty block nodes are fine, and we'll add a
br
later, but empty inline nodes are bad, since the user can't interact with them.While new line range's start offset is zero and its start node is not a prohibited paragraph child, set its start to (parent of start node, index of start node).
- While new line range's start offset is the length of its start node and its start node is not a prohibited paragraph child, set its start to (parent of start node, 1 + index of start node).
- Let end of line be true if new line range contains either nothing or a single
br
, and false otherwise.IE9 makes a new header if there's a trailing
. Firefox 5.0a2, Chrome 13 dev, and Opera 11.10 do not, and I follow them, since it makes more sense (such a
is invisible).If the local name of container is "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", or "h6", and end of line is true, let new container name be the default single-line container name.
This step and the next follow Firefox 5.0a2. IE9 and Chrome 13 dev act as though these two lines were not present (they clone the existing element). Opera 11.10 nests a
inside. Firefox is the most useful, assuming a definition list somehow winds up inside the content (like via formatBlock).
Otherwise, if the local name of container is "dt" and end of line is true, let new container name be "dd".
- Otherwise, if the local name of container is "dd" and end of line is true, let new container name be "dt".
- Otherwise, let new container name be the local name of container.
- Let new container be the result of calling
createElement(new container name)
on the context object.- Copy all attributes of container to new container.
- If new container has an
id
attribute, unset it.- Insert new container into the parent of container immediately after container.
- Let contained nodes be all nodes contained in new line range.
TODO: This blows up any ranges (other than the selection, which we reset), and can alter non-editable nodes, and maybe other bad stuff. May or may not be the best solution. The intermediate fragment is also possibly black-box detectable by DOM mutation events, but I like to pretend those don't exist.
Let frag be the result of calling
extractContents()
on new line range.- Unset the
id
attribute (if any) of eachElement
descendant of frag that is not in contained nodes.- Call
appendChild(frag)
on new container.Needed in case we have something like
, which becomes
[]foo
. In this case we want to add the
foo
br
to thep
, not theli
. Likewise for.
foo[]
While container's
lastChild
is a prohibited paragraph child, set container to itslastChild
.- While new container's
lastChild
is a prohibited paragraph child, set new container to itslastChild
.- If container has no visible children, call
createElement("br")
on the context object, and append the result as the last child of container.These two steps follow Firefox 5.0a2, Chrome 13 dev, and Opera 11.10. IE9 instead inserts an which magically does not appear in innerHTML. In all cases, the reason is that an empty block box in CSS will have zero height, so the user won't be able to put the selection cursor inside it.
If new container has no visible children, call
createElement("br")
on the context object, and append the result as the last child of new container.- Call
collapse(new container, 0)
on the context object's selection.- Return true.
The
insertText
commandThis is the same as typing text (see Additional requirements). If the input string is more than one character, first we split it up into one execution per character, for simplicity. The general rule is then that we record each command's state override or value override, insert the new character and select it, restore any overrides that we saved, and collapse the selection to its end.
The idea of the override business is that the user might run a command like bold when the selection is collapsed. There's nothing to bold in that case, but if the user runs bold and then types a character, they expect it to be bold. Thus we save the requested state in an override and restore it when the user types. Deleting things can also set overrides, if the deleted text was styled.
Whitespace is a special case. The note for canonical space sequences gives some of the background. If the user tries typing a space, we make it non-breaking so it doesn't collapse with anything, then canonicalize whitespace around the insertion point so line breaking isn't adversely affected.
One last special case is a newline. For that we just pass off to the
insertParagraph
command.Supported only by WebKit. Tests in other browsers were manual.
TODO: This doesn't work well if the input contains things that aren't supposed to appear in HTML, like carriage returns or nulls. Nor is it going to work well if the current cursor position is in between two halves of a non-BMP character. This will result in unserializability. The current spec disregards this, as Chrome 14 dev does. (It's not relevant to other browsers, since they don't support this as a command.)
Important issue: non-breaking space fun! The issue: if the user hits space twice, they expect it to create two spaces, not collapse. Also, if they're at the beginning or end of a line and hit space, again, they expect it not to collapse. Since we don't want to require that all contenteditable element contents always be used only with white-space: pre-wrap, we need to convert to and from non-breaking spaces.
But there's a catch: you can't just make spaces non-breaking willy-nilly, because that doesn't just stop the space from collapsing, it also prevents breaking. (Chrome 14 dev actually cheats here: in contenteditable, it doesn't collapse nbsp, but breaks after it like a regular space.) The upshot of this is that any nbsp needs to be followed by a space, or else it might end up at the beginning of a line and be visible there; and it needs to be preceded by a space, or else it might break a line prematurely. How to achieve both of these goals when there are an even number of spaces to display is left as an exercise for the reader.
Browsers vary greatly in how they handle all this, of course!
The basic philosophy of IE9 is that if you're inserting a space, and one or both of the neighboring characters is a space, change the neighboring characters to non-breaking spaces. This breaks if one of the neighboring characters is part of a run of collapsed whitespace: "foo []bar" becomes "foo []bar", which converts one visible space to three.
Firefox 6.0a2 will sometimes convert the space you're inserting to an nbsp, sometimes convert neighboring spaces to nbsps, and sometimes convert neighboring nbsps to spaces. I cannot discern any clear reason to when it chooses what, except that it seems to prefer runs of nbsp's followed by a single space (although not always). I didn't find any outright bugs, except the inevitable ones like nbsp's sometimes being right after letters.
Chrome 14 dev tries to normalize everything to look like " ...", alternating with space then nbsp. Unfortunately, it does so buggily, because it converts collapsed spaces to nbsp's, so inserting a space before " " makes it into " ", which changes one visible space to four (or arbitrarily many).
Opera 11.11 has varying behavior, like Firefox and Chrome. Like Firefox, I didn't discern an obvious pattern.
This was all discussed.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with this nbsp stuff, because of 1) legacy reasons, 2) mail clients might not support CSS equivalents, 3) authors might not know to apply any CSS to wherever the content is eventually used. The behavior I decided on to minimize the evil is as follows:
- If the first and last spaces are in non-collapsing positions, two spaces is nbsp+space, three is space+nbsp+space, four or more is space+nbsp followed by the pattern for two less.
- If the first space has to be an nbsp so it doesn't collapse, three is instead nbsp+nbsp+space, four or more is nbsp+space followed by the pattern for two less.
- If the last space has to be nbsp, two is space+nbsp, three is space+nbsp+nbsp, four or more is space+nbsp followed by the pattern for two less.
- If the first and last space must both be nbsp, two is nbsp+nbsp, three is nbsp+space+nbsp, four or more nbsp+space followed by the pattern for two less.
This avoids nbsp at the end of a run except where it's needed, so words won't appear indented if they wrap to the next line. It avoids more than two nbsp's in a row, so there won't be huge chunks of space that get wrapped all at once. And it avoids nbsp at the beginning of a run except where it's needed or if there are only two spaces in the run, so words won't have to wrap unnecessarily.
This is still a huge headache, though.
Chrome 14 dev does the deletion even if the value is empty. Of course, other browsers don't expose this as an execCommand(), so no one else has any defined behavior in this case at all, so I follow Chrome.
IE9, Firefox 7.0a2, Chrome 14 dev, and Opera 11.50 all don't strip wrappers, except that as usual, Gecko does if you select the whole wrapper, like {foo}. Also, Chrome 14 dev seems to strip the wrapper and try recreating the style in cases like [foobar], where it starts in a wrapper but ends after it; this doesn't always work so well, so I don't do it. Firefox 7.0a2 also has the deletion set overrides for indeterminate state commands, so if you run insertText on [foobarbaz] it will make the result bold.
These things don't make any sense to me, so I don't do them. I set overrides based on the first editable text node in the range when deleting; preserve any wrappers at the start of the range; and restore the overrides in case preserving the wrappers isn't enough (like if they weren't set by deletion at all). This behavior seems to closely match IE9.
Delete the selection, with strip wrappers false.
- If the active range's start node is neither editable nor an editing host, return true.
- If value's length is greater than one:
- For each code unit el in value, take the action for the
insertText
command, with value equal to el.- Return true.
- If value is the empty string, return true.
TODO: WebKit also does magic for tabs, wrapping them in a whitespace-preserving span. Should we?
If value is a newline (U+00A0), take the action for the
insertParagraph
command and return true.- Let node and offset be the active range's start node and offset.
Just to be tidy, add to an existing text node if there is one. Firefox 5.0a2 only adds to an existing one if the range is in a text node. IE9, Chrome 14 dev, and Opera 11.11 also add to an existing text node if the range is in an element adjacent to a text node. If there are two text nodes and it's in between, like foo{}bar, IE and Opera add to the first, Chrome adds to the second, although it probably doesn't matter in practice exactly which we choose.
If node has a child whose index is offset − 1, and that child is a
Text
node, set node to that child, then set offset to node's length.- If node has a child whose index is offset, and that child is a
Text
node, set node to that child, then set offset to zero.- Record current overrides, and let overrides be the result.
- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the context object's selection.- Canonicalize whitespace at (node, offset).
- Let (node, offset) be the active range's start.
- If node is a
Text
node:
- Call
insertData(offset, value)
on node.- Call
collapse(node, offset)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(node, offset + 1)
on the context object's selection.- Otherwise:
If some text is inserted into
or similar, we no longer need the
.If node has only one child, which is a collapsed line break, remove its child from it.
- Let text be the result of calling
createTextNode(value)
on the context object.- Call
insertNode(text)
on the active range.- Call
collapse(text, 0)
on the context object's selection.- Call
extend(text, 1)
on the context object's selection.- Restore states and values from overrides.
- Canonicalize whitespace at the active range's start, with fix collapsed space false.
- Canonicalize whitespace at the active range's end, with fix collapsed space false.
- If value is a space character, autolink the active range's start.
- Call
collapseToEnd()
on the context object's selection.- Return true.
The
insertUnorderedList
commandSee comments for insertOrderedList.
Action: Toggle lists with tag name "ul", then return true.
Indeterminate: True if the selection's list state is "mixed" or "mixed ul", false otherwise.
State: True if the selection's list state is "ul", false otherwise.
The
justifyCenter
commandAction: Justify the selection with alignment "center", then return true.
This roughly matches Chrome 14 dev, although not exactly. Firefox 6.0a2 always returns false.
As a general rule, ignoring nodes with children saves us from treating
as though it's indeterminate. Chrome 14 dev seems to only pay attention to text nodes, instead, or something like that. At any rate, it fails on images. Firefox 6.0a2 (for state and value) gets tripped up by examples like the one given.fooIf we ever support centering of tables and similar, we'd want to pay attention even to some nodes that do have children.
Indeterminate: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if among visible editable nodes that are contained in the result and have no children, at least one has alignment value "center" and at least one does not. Otherwise return false.
IE9 throws exceptions in almost every case when querying the state of justify*, and Opera 11.11 returns false in every case except some seemingly random crazy ones.
Firefox 6.0a2 returns true for the state of justify* if anything in the range has the right alignment, not if everything does. This isn't consistent with how state works for the inline commands, nor with WebKit.
Chrome 14 dev counts text-align on inline elements, which is wrong, because the property has no effect. It also counts it on non-editable elements, which is wrong, because then the state for justify* wouldn't necessarily be true after executing it. (Chrome actually does align the non-editable elements, but that's just a bug.) Chrome further returns false for justify* if the justification is just the default inherited justification, e.g., left for LTR. This doesn't seem to make sense either.
State is kind of redundant here, because it's true if and only if indeterminate is false and the value is equal to the desired value. However, I'll support it anyway, since Gecko/WebKit do.
State: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if there is at least one visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children, and all such nodes have alignment value "center". Otherwise return false.
Not bidi-safe, but it's a pretty marginal corner case where it fails. Firefox 6.0a2 behaves weirdly here: it keys off the start node of the active range, even if that's not contained. Thus {
foo} has value "left" and indeterminate false, which would suggest that the whole selection is aligned left, but that's not the case. Chrome 14 dev returns the state cast to a string, as usual. Opera 11.11 always returns the empty string.Value: Return the empty string if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range, and return the alignment value of the first visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children. If there is no such node, return "left".
The
justifyFull
commandAction: Justify the selection with alignment "justify", then return true.
Indeterminate: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if among visible editable nodes that are contained in the result and have no children, at least one has alignment value "justify" and at least one does not. Otherwise return false.
State: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if there is at least one visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children, and all such nodes have alignment value "justify". Otherwise return false.
Value: Return the empty string if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range, and return the alignment value of the first visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children. If there is no such node, return "left".
The
justifyLeft
commandAction: Justify the selection with alignment "left", then return true.
Indeterminate: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if among visible editable nodes that are contained in the result and have no children, at least one has alignment value "left" and at least one does not. Otherwise return false.
State: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if there is at least one visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children, and all such nodes have alignment value "left". Otherwise return false.
Value: Return the empty string if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range, and return the alignment value of the first visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children. If there is no such node, return "left".
The
justifyRight
commandAction: Justify the selection with alignment "right", then return true.
Indeterminate: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if among visible editable nodes that are contained in the result and have no children, at least one has alignment value "right" and at least one does not. Otherwise return false.
State: Return false if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range. Return true if there is at least one visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children, and all such nodes have alignment value "right". Otherwise return false.
Value: Return the empty string if the active range is null. Otherwise, block-extend the active range, and return the alignment value of the first visible editable node that is contained in the result and has no children. If there is no such node, return "left".
The
outdent
command
- Let items be a list of all
li
s that are inclusive ancestors of the active range's start and/or end node.TODO: This overnormalizes, but it seems like the simplest solution for now.
For each item in items, normalize sublists of item.
- Block-extend the active range, and let new range be the result.
- Let node list be a list of nodes, initially empty.
This step is kind of weird. For regular outdenting, we start at the inside and outdent going out, so that we remove the innermost indentation, on the theory that that will produce the cleanest markup (remove the most nodes). For lists, we remove the outermost indentation, because it makes a difference whether we remove inner or outer indentation, and logically we want to remove outer. E.g.,
- foo
- bar
should become
foo
- bar
not
foo.
- bar
But this is a bit weird and I'm wondering if it's really correct. TODO: Reexamine this.
For each node node contained in new range, append node to node list if the last member of node list (if any) is not an ancestor of node; node is editable; and either node has no editable descendants, or is an
ol
orul
, or is anli
whose parent is anol
orul
.- While node list is not empty:
- While the first member of node list is an
ol
orul
or is not the child of anol
orul
, outdent it and remove it from node list.- If node list is empty, break from these substeps.
- Let sublist be a list of nodes, initially empty.
- Remove the first member of node list and append it to sublist.
- While the first member of node list is the
nextSibling
of the last member of sublist, and the first member of node list is not anol
orul
, remove the first member of node list and append it to sublist.- Record the values of sublist, and let values be the result.
- Split the parent of sublist.
- Fix disallowed ancestors of each member of sublist.
- Restore the values from values.
- Return true.
Miscellaneous commands
The
copy
commandIE9 supports copy/cut/paste with a security warning. Firefox reportedly only supports it if you set a pref. I didn't find info on other browsers, but in my tests it didn't do anything. I'm not going to try speccing it unless implementers are interested in working out the security problems and trying to get interop. It seems like as of June 2011, everyone just uses Flash for this. So it would be nice if we could work out a more secure standardized substitute.
Action: The user agent must either copy the current selection to the clipboard as though the user had requested it, or throw a
SecurityError
exception. This specification does not define exactly how the selection is to be copied to the clipboard, but the Clipboard API and events specification might be useful.User agents should exercise caution in respecting this command, because sites could abuse it to confuse and annoy the user by overwriting the clipboard with extremely long, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content.
The idea is sites might catch the SECURITY_ERR and treat it differently from NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR, like encouraging users to reconfigure their browser. However, browsers might not want to encourage authors to tell users to reconfigure their browser insecurely.
User agents may choose not to support this command at all. If a user agent will only honor the command for some whitelisted sites depending on configuration, it may either throw a
SecurityError
exception for non-whitelisted sites, or it may act as though the command is unsupported on those sites.The
cut
commandSee comment for copy.
Action: The user agent must either copy the current selection to the clipboard and then delete it, as though the user had requested it, or throw a
SecurityError
exception. This specification does not define exactly how the selection is to be deleted or copied to the clipboard, but the Clipboard API and events specification might be useful.User agents should exercise caution in respecting this command, because sites could abuse it to confuse and annoy the user by overwriting the clipboard with extremely long, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content.
User agents may choose not to support this command at all. If a user agent will only honor the command for some whitelisted sites depending on configuration, it may either throw a
SecurityError
exception for non-whitelisted sites, or it may act as though the command is unsupported on those sites.The
defaultParagraphSeparator
commandThis is a new feature, added by request in bug 15527. (Opera already had an o-defaultblock command that worked similarly.) If you are implementing this, please make sure to file any feedback as bugs. The spec is not finalized yet and can still be easily changed.
Action: Let value be converted to ASCII lowercase. If value is then equal to "p" or "div", set the context object's default single-line container name to value, then return true. Otherwise, return false.
Value: Return the context object's default single-line container name.
The
paste
commandSee comment for copy.
Action: The user agent must either delete the selection and then paste the clipboard's contents to the current cursor position, as though the user had requested it, or throw a
SecurityError
exception. This specification does not define exactly how the clipboard is to be converted to HTML for pasting, but the Clipboard API and events specification might be useful.User agents should exercise caution in respecting this command, because sites could abuse it to read private information from the clipboard.
User agents may choose not to support this command at all. If a user agent will only honor the command for some whitelisted sites depending on configuration, it may either throw a
SecurityError
exception for non-whitelisted sites, or it may act as though the command is unsupported on those sites.The
redo
commandAction: As defined by the UndoManager specification.
The
selectAll
commandThis is totally broken: if executed inside an editing host, it has to select the editing host contents, not the whole document. See bug.
Tested using roughly this.
- IE9
- A bit confusing. The gist seems to be that it does selectAllChildren() on the body, except sometimes it doesn't.
- Firefox 5.0a2
- Throws an exception if nothing in the document is editable, which apparently it always does for execCommand(). If there's a body, it does selectAllChildren() on that, and otherwise it does selectAllChildren() on the root element. If there's no root element, throws an exception.
- Chrome 13 dev
- If there's no root element, removes the selection. If there's a root element but no body, collapses the selection at (document, 0). If there's a body, it selects all the contents of the body, although that doesn't mean the resulting anchor or focus actually are the body node (they're usually text nodes). But it seems to *avoid* selecting contenteditable stuff: if all the visible things in the body are contenteditable, it removes all ranges from the selection, and if some are, it freaks out and behaves oddly. But designMode doesn't trouble it.
- Opera 11.11
- Was characteristically uncooperative in my tests, and I didn't try to investigate further.
The behavior here is relatively simple and largely matches implementations.
TODO: Is this right even for framesets?
Let target be the body element of the context object.
TODO: Is this right even for documents whose root element is not an HTML element?
If target is null, let target be the context object's
documentElement
.- If target is null, call
getSelection()
on the context object, and callremoveAllRanges()
on the result.- Otherwise, call
getSelection()
on the context object, and callselectAllChildren(target)
on the result.- Return true.
The
styleWithCSS
commandIE9 and Opera 11.00 don't support this command. By and large, they act the way Gecko and WebKit do when styleWithCSS is off. Gecko invented it, and WebKit also supports it. The default in Firefox 4.0 is off, while all other browsers behave like the default is on (and IE/Opera give no way to turn it off), so I default it to on.
Handling of value matches Firefox 5.0a2. Chrome 13 dev treats the case-sensitive string "true" as true, the case-sensitive string "false" as false, and does nothing for any other string. I went with Gecko because this way there are only two possible effects, not three, which makes it easier to reason about and debug. Also, Gecko made up the command, so this is probably more web-compatible. Cursory searches of Google Code and GitHub suggest that authors almost always pass a boolean as the third argument when using styleWithCSS, in which case the two behaviors work the same.
Action: If value is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "false", set the CSS styling flag to false. Otherwise, set the CSS styling flag to true. Either way, return true.
This follows Chrome 13 dev. Firefox 5.0a2 doesn't support queryCommandState() for styleWithCSS.
State: True if the CSS styling flag is true, otherwise false.
The
undo
commandAction: As defined by the UndoManager specification.
The
useCSS
commandSupported by Firefox 4.0, but not IE9 or Opera 11.00 (which don't support styleWithCSS either), nor by Chrome 12 dev (which does support styleWithCSS). useCSS was the original feature in Mozilla 1.3, but the meaning is backward, so Gecko added styleWithCSS as a replacement. No state is defined, since only Gecko supports useCSS at all, and as of Firefox 6.0a2, it doesn't support queryCommandState() for it.
As of September 2011, WebKit is adding support for this command, so it can no longer be considered deprecated.
Action: If value is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "false", set the CSS styling flag to true. Otherwise, set the CSS styling flag to false. Either way, return true.
Since the effect of this command is the opposite of what one would expect, user agents are encouraged to point authors to
styleWithCSS
whenuseCSS
is used, such as by logging a warning to an error console.No state is defined for this command, so
queryCommandState("useCSS")
must always return false. To query the CSS styling flag's current value, authors have to use thestyleWithCSS
command.Additional requirements
It has been suggested that some things here need to be platform-dependent, not fully standardized. For now I'm standardizing them anyway, because the large majority of behavior should be platform-agnostic. If anyone has suggestions as to particular things that should be left up to platform behavior, please say so.
When the user instructs the user agent to insert a line break inside an editing host, such as by pressing the Enter key while the cursor is in an editable node, the user agent must call
execCommand("insertparagraph")
on the relevant document.When the user instructs the user agent to insert a line break inside an editing host without breaking out of the current block, such as by pressing Shift-Enter or Option-Enter while the cursor is in an editable node, the user agent must call
execCommand("insertlinebreak")
on the relevant document.When the user instructs the user agent to delete the previous character inside an editing host, such as by pressing the Backspace key while the cursor is in an editable node, the user agent must call
execCommand("delete")
on the relevant document.When the user instructs the user agent to delete the next character inside an editing host, such as by pressing the Delete key while the cursor is in an editable node, the user agent must call
execCommand("forwarddelete")
on the relevant document.When the user instructs the user agent to insert text inside an editing host, such as by typing on the keyboard while the cursor is in an editable node, the user agent must call
execCommand("inserttext", false, value)
on the relevant document, with value equal to the text the user provided. If the user inserts multiple characters at once or in quick succession, this specification does not define whether it is treated as one insertion or several consecutive insertions.The user agent may allow the user to make other changes to editable content, such as causing Ctrl-B to call
execCommand("bold")
. Any such change must be accomplished by callingexecCommand()
, so that in particular, "beforeinput" and "input" events fire as appropriate. The command invoked should be one of the standard commands defined in this specification if possible, and otherwise must be a vendor-specific command.Acknowledgements
This section is not normative.
Thanks to:
- Google and Mozilla, for funding this work
- Ian Hickson, for overseeing it initially
- Ian Hickson and Ms2ger, for starting the selection work
- Julie Parent, Ojan Vafai, Alex Russel, and Eric Seidel for their research on how browsers and other rich text editors behave in many common scenarios
- Ehsan Akhgari, Tab Atkins, Mathias Bynens, Tim Down, Markus Ernst, Daniel Glazman, Tali Gregor (née Fuss), Stig Halvorsen, Jeff Harris, Ian Hickson, Cameron Heavon-Jones, Anne van Kesteren, Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo, Glenn Maynard, Ms2ger, Ryosuke Niwa, Robert O'Callahan, Julie Parent, Simon Pieters, Michael A. Puls II, Rich Schwerdtfeger, Jonas Sicking, Henri Sivonen, Smylers, Hallvord R. M. Steen, Roland Steiner, Annie Sullivan, timeless, Ojan Vafai, Brett Zamir, and Boris Zbarsky for their feedback, participation, or other helpful contributions
TODO:
Also TODO: Things that are only implemented by a couple of browsers and may or may not be useful to spec:
Things I haven't looked at that multiple browsers implement:
Also need to look at contenteditable=plaintext-only.