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EditContext is an API that allows authors to more directly participate in the text input process.
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This section is non-normative.
Modern operating systems provide mechanisms to produce text in a variety of ways: speech-to-text, virtual keyboards, handwriting recognition and many more. When an app wants to consume text input from these various sources, it must first provide a view of its currently editable text to the operating system. The view of editable text provides a common language that apps (having a variety of different document models) and sources of text (having a variety of different input methods) can both understand. Both the apps and input sources communicate with one another by expressing their desired changes to the state of the common view as an event that the other can handle to facilitate the text input process.
For the purposes of this document, a producer of text is known as a Text Input Method. The view provided by an app which wants to consume text is called a Text Edit Context. The service provided by the OS to facilitate the editing of text in the Text Edit Context by the Text Input Methods is called a Text Input Service.
Here’s a typical flow for the text input process in more detail:
Existing user agents handle the details of this text input process so that the author’s responsibility ends at declaring what elements of the document represent an editable region. Authors express which regions are editable using input elements, textarea elements, contenteditable elements, or by setting the designMode attribute to "on" to mark an entire document as editable.
As an editable region of the document is focused, the user agent automatically produces the Text Edit Context from the contents of the editable region and the position of the selection within it. When a Text Input Method produces text, the user agent translates the events against its Text Edit Context into a set of DOM and style modifications – only some of which are described using existing events that an author can handle.
Authors that want to produce sophisticated editing experiences may be challenged by the current approach. If, for example, the text and selection are rendered to a canvas, user agents are unable to produce a Text Edit Context to drive the text input process. Authors compensate by resorting to offscreen editable elements, but this approach comes with negative implications for accessibility, it deteriorates the input experience, and requires complex code to synchronize the position of the text in the offscreen editable element with the corresponding text in the canvas.
With the introduction of this EditContext API, authors can more directly participate in the protocol for text input and avoid the pitfalls described above.
The Text Input Service and Text Edit Context are abstractions representing the common aspects of text input across many operating systems.
An EditContext is a JavaScript reflection of the Text Edit Context.
When changes are made to the Text Edit Context by the Text Input Service, those changes are reflected to the author asynchronously in the form of events which are dispatched against the active EditContext.
When the author makes changes to the active EditContext, those changes will be reflected in the Text Edit Context during the next lifecycle update.
Both the Text Edit Context and EditContext have a text state which holds the information exchanged in the aforementioned updates. The text state consists of:
DOMString representing editable content. The initial value is the empty string.DOMRect describing the area of the viewport in which text is displayed. It is in the client coordinate system and the initial x, y, width, and height are all 0.DOMRect describing the position of selection. It is in the client coordinate system and the initial x, y, width, and height are all 0.DOMRect defining the bounding box of each codepoint. The array is initially empty.text format is a struct that indicates decorative properties that should be applied to the ranges of text. The struct contains:
UnderlineStyle which is the preferred underline style of the decorated text range.UnderlineThickness which is the preferred underline thickness of the decorated text range.
Codepoint rects provides the means for the user agent to query a range of
text for positioning information. The Text Input Service will use this
information, in tandem with the control bounds and selection bounds, to
support the Text Input Method in properly displaying its user interface. For example,
the info can be used to position an IME window adjacent to text being composed.
Different platforms may require different positions to be cached to fulfill queries
from the Text Input Service. The user agent will indicate which positions are
required by firing CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent.
Control bounds, selection bounds, and codepoint rects are given in the client coordinate system, which is defined as a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system (x, y) where the origin is the top-left corner of the layout viewport, the x-axis points towards the top-right of the layout viewport, and the y-axis points towards the bottom-left of the layout viewport. The units of the client coordinate system are CSS pixels.
Since EditContext bounds are defined in client coordinates, the coordinates indicating a given piece of content on a page will change as the user scrolls the document even if the content itself does not change position in the document. A scenario where authors may want to take this into account is the case where the user scrolls the page where the user has an active composition. If the author does not update the EditContext's bounds information (e.g. during a scroll event listener), the IME window may no longer line up with the text being composed for the duration of the composition.
However, some platforms do not adjust IME windows during an active composition, so updating bounds information mid-composition does not guarantee that the IME window will be repositioned until it's closed and reopened.
An EditContext has an associated element, an HTMLElement.
An element becomes an EditContext's associated element by assigning
the EditContext to the element's editContext property.
An HTMLElement can be associated with at most one EditContext.
An EditContext keeps its associated element alive, so developers
should be aware that assigning an EditContext to an element's
editContext property will prevent the element from being garbage
collected until the property is cleared or the EditContext is garbage collected.
If an EditContext's associated element's
parent is not
editable and
is not a Document whose designMode attribute is "on",
then the associated element becomes an EditContext editing host.
An EditContext editing host is a type of editing host whose behaviors
are described in 1.2.3 Differences for an EditContext editing host.
There are a couple implications of this. Firstly, if an element that is already
an editing host due to contenteditable
becomes an EditContext's associated element, then that element
becomes an EditContext editing host. In other words, if both EditContext
and contenteditable are set on an element, the EditContext
behavior "wins".
Secondly, if an element is
editable
but not an editing host (i.e. it is a child in the subtree of an
editing host), then becoming an EditContext's associated element
has no effect on that element. This is analogous to the behavior of
contenteditable, where setting contenteditable
to "true" on an
editable
element that is not an editing host has no effect. Taken together, these
rules imply that an editable tree of nodes will follow either the
EditContext behavior or non-EditContext behavior, but the behaviors
cannot be mixed.
A Document has an active EditContext, which may be null.
The following paragraph can be removed once the behavior change lands in [input-events].
When an EditContext editing host receives text input from the Text Input Service, as the default action for the beforeinput event fired as a result of that input the user agent must run Handle Input for EditContext given the EditContext editing host .
In many ways, an EditContext editing host behaves in the same way as other types of editing host,
e.g. for a contenteditable element. Notable similarities include:
contenteditable attribute set to "false".
There are also some ways that an EditContext editing host differs from other types of editing hosts:
Document being edited has an active EditContext, the user agent must not update the DOM
as a direct result of a user action in the EditContext editing host
(e.g., keyboard input in an editable region, deleting or formatting text, ...).
Document being edited has an active EditContext, the user agent must not fire the
input event
against the EditContext editing host as a direct result of user action
event as specified in [uievents].
The user agent fires several types of events against the EditContext in order to
inform the author when they must update the state of the DOM in response to changes
from the Text Input Service, or respond to a query from the Text Input Service.
Since the timings of Text Input Services are platform-specific, authors should
avoid taking dependencies on the timing of these events.
TextUpdateEvent when the Text Input Service indicates
that the user has made changes to the text, the selection, or the composition range
properties of the EditContext. When the author receives this event, they must render
the changes back to the page's view so the user can see what they are typing.
TextFormatUpdateEvent when the Text Input Service
indicates that certain formats should be applied to the text being composed. When
the author receives this event, they must render the formatting change back to
the page's view to aid the user with their IME composition.
The user agent must fire CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent when the
Text Input Service indicates that it requires character bounds information
to support the Text Input Method in properly displaying its user interface.
After receiving CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent, the author must compute the
requested character bounds and call updateCharacterBounds to
update the character bounds in the EditContext's text state. The author
should perform the updateCharacterBounds call synchronously
within the CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent event handler if possible; if not,
it is permissible to call it asynchronously.
Upon receiving updateCharacterBounds, the user agent must
pass the character bounds information on to the Text Input Service.
The longer the author delays the updateCharacterBounds call,
the higher the likelihood that the user will observe a visual stutter as the
IME window repositions itself in the middle of a composition.
A new step will be introduced as a substep within the Update the rendering step
in the HTML Event Loops Processing Model, immediately following step 15 (which runs
the focusing steps for Documents whose
focused areas
become non-focusable). The step is: For each
fully active
Document doc, queue a global task on the DOM manipulation task source
given doc's relevant global object to run
the Update the Text Edit Context steps given doc.
This section is non-normative.
Using an EditContext, an author can mark a region of the document editable by associating an EditContext object with an element as shown in the example below:
In the example below, the author is using a canvas to draw an editable region that allows the user to input a single line of text rendered with a monospace font. The text for the editable region is maintained by the author as a String. The text offsets for the selection in the editable region are maintained by the author as a pair of Numbers: selectionStart and selectionEnd. The Numbers refer to the count of the number of UTF-16 codepoints to the left of the start and end of the selection respectively. For the sake of communicating the bounding boxes for the current selection and the editable region of the document to Text Input Services, the author also computes the bounding rectangle in CSS pixels for the selection and the editable region of the document. The offset of the rectangle is expressed relative to the origin of the canvas element since that is the element to which the author has associated an EditContext. Since the model for the author’s representation of text and selection location matches the form expected by the EditContext API, the author can simply assign those properties to the EditContext associated with the canvas whenever those values change.
Building on the previous example, in response to user input, authors should handle the events of both the editable element (in this case a canvas) and the EditContext.
Input events against the DOM continue to describe the user’s intent
The below example shows how to handle TextUpdateEvent, TextFormatUpdateEvent, and CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent to update the model and render the result to the canvas.
This section is non-normative.
An author doesn’t have to use a canvas element with an EditContext. In the example below the author uses a div to establish an editable region of the document and renders the contents into that editable region using various other styled elements, images and text. This allows the author to leverage other built-in editing primitives from the user agent such as selection and spellcheck.
As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
This specification defines conformance criteria that apply to a single product: the user agent that implements the interfaces that it contains.
Conformance requirements phrased as algorithms or specific steps may be implemented in any manner, so long as the end result is equivalent. (In particular, the algorithms defined in this specification are intended to be easy to follow, and not intended to be performant.)
WebIDLpartial interface HTMLElement {
attribute EditContext? editContext;
};
An HTMLElement has an internal slot [[EditContext]], which is a reference to an EditContext and is intially null.
editContext getter steps are to return the value of this's internal [[EditContext]] slot.editContext setter must follow these steps:
canvas", then throw a "NotSupportedError" DOMException.NotSupportedError" DOMException.HTMLElement receiving the inputRun the steps to Update the EditContext given editContext and the Text Edit Context's text state's text, text formats, selection start, selection end, is composing, composition start, and composition end.
Since Text Edit Context is an abstraction over the common aspects of text input across different operating systems, the determination of the values in the Text Edit Context is explicitly not given in this specification. They will vary across different operating systems and input devices.
insertTextinsertTransposedeleteWordBackwarddeleteWordForwarddeleteContentdeleteContentBackwarddeleteContentForwardEditContext
are those which operate only on raw text. Other inputTypes
that depend on formats, clipboard/dragdrop, undo, or browser UI like spellcheck cannot be handled by
EditContext since EditContext's state does not include these concepts. If an author wants their
application to handle those inputTypes,
they need to process them manually in a beforeinput
event handler.
EditContextCompositionEvent.
CompositionEvent.
CompositionEvent.
DocumentNote that the steps to update the Text Edit Context's text state are dependent on the nature of the abstraction created over a platform-specific Text Input Service. Those details are not part of this specification.
EditContextTextUpdateEvent, with
text initialized to text,
selectionStart initialized to |editContext's selection start, and
selectionEnd initialized to editContext's selection end.
EditContextTextFormat, initially empty.
TextFormat. with rangeStart, rangeEnd, underlineStyle, underlineThickness.rangeStart to format's range start.rangeEnd to format's range end.underlineStyle to format's underline style.underlineThickness to format's underline thickness.TextFormatUpdateEvent with
the TextFormatUpdateEvent's text format list initialized to formats.
EditContextCharacterBoundsUpdateEvent with
rangeStart initialized to editContext's composition start and
rangeEnd initialized to editContext's composition end.
EditContextCompositionEvent.
DocumentEditContext, or null.If focused is null or if the shadow-including root of focused is not document, return null.
The purpose of getting focusable through the top-level traversable is that we want there to be only one active EditContext at a time per top-level traversable. So if system focus is in some other document, this document can't have an active EditContext.
If an EditContext's associated element's parent is editable, that EditContext
can't become the active EditContext. This is the case regardless of whether that
parent is editable due to another EditContext or due to contenteditable.
WebIDLdictionary EditContextInit {
DOMString text;
unsigned long selectionStart;
unsigned long selectionEnd;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface EditContext : EventTarget {
constructor(optional EditContextInit options = {});
undefined updateText(unsigned long rangeStart, unsigned long rangeEnd,
DOMString text);
undefined updateSelection(unsigned long start, unsigned long end);
undefined updateControlBounds(DOMRect controlBounds);
undefined updateSelectionBounds(DOMRect selectionBounds);
undefined updateCharacterBounds(unsigned long rangeStart, sequence<DOMRect> characterBounds);
sequence<HTMLElement> attachedElements();
readonly attribute DOMString text;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionEnd;
readonly attribute unsigned long characterBoundsRangeStart;
sequence<DOMRect> characterBounds();
attribute EventHandler ontextupdate;
attribute EventHandler ontextformatupdate;
attribute EventHandler oncharacterboundsupdate;
attribute EventHandler oncompositionstart;
attribute EventHandler oncompositionend;
};
text getter steps are to return this's text.selectionStart getter steps are to return this's selection start.selectionEnd getter steps are to return this's selection end.characterBounds getter steps are to return this's codepoint rects.characterBoundsRangeStart getter steps are to return this's codepoint rects start index.The method must follow these steps:
The method must follow these steps:
The method must follow these steps:
DOMRectThe method must follow these steps:
DOMRectThe method must follow these steps:
DOMRectThe method returns a list with one item which is the the EditContext's associated element, or an empty list if the EditContext's associated element is null.
This method returns a list instead of a single element for forward compatibility if EditContext is ever granted the ability to have multiple associated elements.
The event handler for TextUpdateEvent.
The event handler for CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent.
The event handler for TextFormatUpdateEvent.
The event handler for the compositionstart event.
The event handler for the compositionend event.
WebIDLdictionary TextUpdateEventInit : EventInit {
unsigned long updateRangeStart;
unsigned long updateRangeEnd;
DOMString text;
unsigned long selectionStart;
unsigned long selectionEnd;
unsigned long compositionStart;
unsigned long compositionEnd;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface TextUpdateEvent : Event {
constructor(DOMString type, optional TextUpdateEventInit options = {});
readonly attribute unsigned long updateRangeStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long updateRangeEnd;
readonly attribute DOMString text;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionEnd;
};
updateRangeStart, of type unsigned long, readonlyupdateRangeEnd, of type unsigned long, readonlytext, of type DOMString, readonlyselectionStart, of type unsigned long, readonlyselectionEnd, of type unsigned long, readonlyWebIDLenum UnderlineStyle { "none", "solid", "dotted", "dashed", "wavy" };
enum UnderlineThickness { "none", "thin", "thick" };
dictionary TextFormatInit {
unsigned long rangeStart;
unsigned long rangeEnd;
UnderlineStyle underlineStyle;
UnderlineThickness underlineThickness;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface TextFormat {
constructor(optional TextFormatInit options = {});
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeEnd;
readonly attribute UnderlineStyle underlineStyle;
readonly attribute UnderlineThickness underlineThickness;
};
dictionary TextFormatUpdateEventInit : EventInit {
sequence<TextFormat> textFormats;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface TextFormatUpdateEvent : Event {
constructor(DOMString type, optional TextFormatUpdateEventInit options = {});
sequence<TextFormat> getTextFormats();
};
rangeStart, of type unsigned long, readonlyrangeEnd, of type unsigned long, readonlyunderlineStyle, of type UnderlineStyle, readonlyunderlineThickness, of type UnderlineThickness, readonlygetTextFormats method
A TextFormatUpdateEvent has an associated text format list, a list of zero or more text formats.
WebIDLdictionary CharacterBoundsUpdateEventInit : EventInit {
unsigned long rangeStart;
unsigned long rangeEnd;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent : Event {
constructor(DOMString type, optional CharacterBoundsUpdateEventInit options = {});
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeEnd;
};
rangeStart, of type unsigned long, readonly
rangeEnd, of type unsigned long, readonly
WebIDLpartial interface HTMLElement {
attribute EditContext? editContext;
};
dictionary EditContextInit {
DOMString text;
unsigned long selectionStart;
unsigned long selectionEnd;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface EditContext : EventTarget {
constructor(optional EditContextInit options = {});
undefined updateText(unsigned long rangeStart, unsigned long rangeEnd,
DOMString text);
undefined updateSelection(unsigned long start, unsigned long end);
undefined updateControlBounds(DOMRect controlBounds);
undefined updateSelectionBounds(DOMRect selectionBounds);
undefined updateCharacterBounds(unsigned long rangeStart, sequence<DOMRect> characterBounds);
sequence<HTMLElement> attachedElements();
readonly attribute DOMString text;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionEnd;
readonly attribute unsigned long characterBoundsRangeStart;
sequence<DOMRect> characterBounds();
attribute EventHandler ontextupdate;
attribute EventHandler ontextformatupdate;
attribute EventHandler oncharacterboundsupdate;
attribute EventHandler oncompositionstart;
attribute EventHandler oncompositionend;
};
dictionary TextUpdateEventInit : EventInit {
unsigned long updateRangeStart;
unsigned long updateRangeEnd;
DOMString text;
unsigned long selectionStart;
unsigned long selectionEnd;
unsigned long compositionStart;
unsigned long compositionEnd;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface TextUpdateEvent : Event {
constructor(DOMString type, optional TextUpdateEventInit options = {});
readonly attribute unsigned long updateRangeStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long updateRangeEnd;
readonly attribute DOMString text;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long selectionEnd;
};
enum UnderlineStyle { "none", "solid", "dotted", "dashed", "wavy" };
enum UnderlineThickness { "none", "thin", "thick" };
dictionary TextFormatInit {
unsigned long rangeStart;
unsigned long rangeEnd;
UnderlineStyle underlineStyle;
UnderlineThickness underlineThickness;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface TextFormat {
constructor(optional TextFormatInit options = {});
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeEnd;
readonly attribute UnderlineStyle underlineStyle;
readonly attribute UnderlineThickness underlineThickness;
};
dictionary TextFormatUpdateEventInit : EventInit {
sequence<TextFormat> textFormats;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface TextFormatUpdateEvent : Event {
constructor(DOMString type, optional TextFormatUpdateEventInit options = {});
sequence<TextFormat> getTextFormats();
};
dictionary CharacterBoundsUpdateEventInit : EventInit {
unsigned long rangeStart;
unsigned long rangeEnd;
};
[Exposed=Window]
interface CharacterBoundsUpdateEvent : Event {
constructor(DOMString type, optional CharacterBoundsUpdateEventInit options = {});
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeStart;
readonly attribute unsigned long rangeEnd;
};Add contributors
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