220262 - Implement scrollintoview for range objects

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, enhancement)

Description

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030917 Firebird/0.6.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030917 Firebird/0.6.1+

From this comment:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123075#c5

Let's imagine that we have some (selected) text. But we have no ideas where is
it located in textarea. It can be out of the visible part. MSIE has this method
for scrolling to this text:
tr = document.selection.createRange();
tr.scrollIntoView(false); //for end of selection aligned to end of scrolled area
or
tr.scrollIntoView(true); //for beginning of selection aligned to top of scrolled
area

I think this method is necessary for range objects, because it is otherwise very
difficult with javascript to scroll to the desired range object.
What also would be handy for range objects are the .offsetTop .offsetLeft
offsetWidth and offsetHeight properties (for more control of scrolling)


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Attachment: Example for IE, so you can see how it works in IE

Not that this does not work correctly (well according to MS description) in IE5
(IE6 I do not know), for a selection which is in a div with overflow:scroll or
a textarea.
If the method's argument is true, it should scroll to the top of the window.
If false, it should scroll to the bottom of the window.

See MS information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/methods/scrollintoview.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/obj_textrange.asp


I happened to see already a method called scrollSelectionIntoView in the xpcom
reference:
http://www.xulplanet.com/references/xpcomref/ifaces/nsISelectionController.html#method_scrollSelectionIntoView

Comment 2

[Daniel Cazzulino]

Even if this method appears in the nsIDOMNSHTMLElement interface, it doesn't
work as expected (i.e. does nothing at all). IE implements it and makes
chat-like windows built on TextArea a span. The same is impossible with Mozilla.

Comment 3

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

WebKit, Presto and Trident don't support it on actual Ranges, it's not in a spec, and the test case doesn't seem to do anything in IE either.

Comment 4

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

You have to select something in the testcase, then click on the button to be able to test.

This bug can't be invalid, it's a feature request. A spec has to be written for this.

Comment 5

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

Ah, I take that back. IE does indeed do something with the test case. However, we don't implement the range objects this bug is about, and we're not going to implement them. If someone wants to add features to some other API, there are better forums than this one.