Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Little bit of buzz out there about the forthcoming implementation of contentEditable in Mozilla. Some have branded this discussion a flame war. I disagree; the thread gets a little hot towards the end, but there’re many good points raised. One thing is for certain: people want this feature. Like, yesterday.

Some of the conflict seems to be centered around the fact that the implementation will mirror that of Internet Explorer, and whether Mozilla should be playing catch-up with Microsoft instead of sticking to W3 standards. To my knowledge, no W3 working group is discussing how to implement editable content directly in a Web page, so the question remains: do we follow IE’s de facto standard, or wait for a standards body to hammer out one?

Well, it’s not like this hasn’t happened before with the innerHTML property and the XMLHttpRequest object. The MS implementation is robust and widely-deployed. Do we really have to reinvent the wheel?

Not implementing a CONTENTEDITABLE attribute because it violates the (X)HTML spec is an acceptable excuse. Not implementing in-browser editing features because M$ dr00lz! or no de jure standard exists is not. Especially when potential users are clamoring for it. Extraspecially when the browser in question is being positioned as an application platform. Kudos to the Mozilla engineers for making the right choice: mirror the IE implementation and prevent further fragmentation of the technologies.

If and when the W3 catches up, the decision will already have been made. Them’s the breaks.

PS: this whole diatribe was an excuse to use my new word, “extraspecially.”