On Wed, 5 Sep 2012, Ojan Vafai wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Sun, 17 Jun 2012, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> > >
> > > If you type some stuff and then delete it all, the desired result
> > > will vary based on lots of factors, e.g.:
> > >
> > > * Whether <div> or <p> is being used for paragraph separators.
> > > Both <p><br></p> and <div><br></div> might make sense for "nothing",
> > > depending.  This is author-configurable using the
> > > defaultParagraphSeparator command.
> > >
> > > * Whether there was any styling present before.  If all the text was
> > > previously bold, for instance, deleting everything might result in
> > > something like <p><b><br></b></p>, because per spec, deletion
> > > doesn't remove style tags from empty lines.
> > >
> > > * Whether there was any other special markup.  If something (like
> > > execCommand("insertHTML")) made the first line have <p id="foo">,
> > > then deleting everything would result in <p id="foo"><br></p>.
> > >
> > > * What the author specified as the initial contents of the editable
> > > area.  If you have <div contenteditable><br></div> to start with,
> > > and the user puts the cursor there and then types "foo" and then
> > > deletes it, you'll go back to having just <br>, because nothing ever
> > > inserted a <p> or <div> or anything.  (As soon as the user hits
> > > Enter, both the old and new lines are wrapped in a paragraph
> > > separator per spec, although only IE/Opera do this right now.)
> > >
> > > Really, you can have any HTML markup at all in contenteditable, and
> > > we can't avoid that.  There's not going to be any reliable way to
> > > figure out what "nothing" is if you can't answer the same question
> > > for arbitrary HTML.
> >
> > Maybe the right way to detect "nothing" is to compare textContent
> > against "" and then to look for specific elements that count as
> > palpable content, like <img>. Would it make sense to provide an API
> > for that?
>
> Seems reasonable to me. That's the trickiest part of making this work
> from script. If you had an API for this, hooking focus/blur events is
> pretty straightforward. If, in the end, we still decide to add
> placeholder, it will just use this API anyways.