The current code of the Visual Editor reimplements many basic editing
functions, which are available in the browsers: text selection,
alignment, cursor movement and appearance and even cursor blinking.
This is a major problem for internationalization. These functions work
very differently in different languages. Most browsers already support
most of the needed functionality in textarea and in content-editable.
Overriding them in the Visual Editor means that it will be unusable in
any language except English.
To name just a few basic examples:
* Cursor shape: In bidirectional environments the cursor has an arrow
pointing in the writing direction. In the current VE it's just a
stick. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_cursor#Bi-directional_text
* Cursor position: VE always positions the cursor as it the text is
left-to-right. The same goes for text selection.
* Word boundary: Ctrl-left/right arrow moves the cursor word by word.
Browsers support all Unicode scripts for word boundary identification,
but in the current VE it only works with ASCII.
* Character segmentation and cursor movement: A letter with one or
more diacritics is one character segment according to Unicode (UAX
#29), even if internally it's composed of several Unicode characters.
For example, <שָּׁ> is composed of four characters, but only one arrow
key press is supposed to move the cursor over it. That's what the
browsers already do for years, but in the Visual Editor, four key
presses are needed.
This is just a small sample of the potential issues.
Bugs are already reported for some of these issues, but the basic
question is - why reimplement it all in the first place? Why not use
what the browsers offer as much as possible?
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore