49333 - Need a mechanism to delete hidden/unviewable elements

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Editor, defect, P5)

Description

[rubydoo123]

When a user selects indent/outdent and blockquotes get inserted, or if a user 
does a copy/paste with extra linefeed in it (caused by empty block elements), 
those elements cannot be deleted. There needs to be a mechanism in normal mode 
to delete those elements. In Show All Tags mode, you cannot select the icon and 
delete it either. In HTML mode, the user would need to know that they must 
delete the opening and closing tags.

See the comments from bug 48936

Comment 1

[Joe Francis]

In show all tags mode, we should make clicking on the icon select the element.  
We should also make contextual menu's over the icon include a delete element 
command.  Charlie, Kathy, any thoughts?  

If folks agree with my proposal, then I'm probably not the best person to own 
this.  There are probably other deletion bugs associated with this problem that I 
should own, though.  

Comment 2

[Charles Manske]

Single clicking on an icon in Show All Tags mode used to select the element,
but on mouse up, it is getting unselected. I'll look into that issue.
In HTML Source mode, the user can delete the start tag only -- the parser will
strip out the stranded close tag.
There is something funky going on about blockquotes, however: they seem 
difficult to remove.

Comment 3

[Charles Manske]

Go into Show All Tags mode with a page that has some tags, like a blockquote.
Click mouse down, and you see the contents selected. On mouse up, the selection
is recollapsed to the beginning.
Tony or Mike: Do you know of any changes to mouse/selection code that would
cause the selection to be changed on mouseup?

Comment 4

[Charles Manske]

I figured out how to keep the element selected when you click on an icon in
Show All Tags mode, but that isn't going to do what beppe wanted anyway.
If you have multiple levels of blockquote, and you click on any of the icons,
all of the contents under the blockquote are selected, so deleting would 
delete all of that, when you probably wanted a way to remove just one of the 
"blockquote" nodes in the DOM tree, correct?

Comment 5

[Joe Francis]

right.  and in fact, it's a hard problem in general, because even if we had a 
"remove the node but keep the children" command, you can't always execute that on 
a given node.  For example, you cant remove a list but keep the list items: list 
itms have to be in a list.

Comment 6

[Joe Francis]

evil spirits in this program, COME OUT!

Comment 7

[Joe Francis]

beth and i talked; if u have blockquote inside li, outdent does the wrong thing: 
it should outdent the blockquote before outdenting the list item.

Comment 8

[rubydoo123]

adding priority

Comment 9

[rubydoo123]

setting to future and adding helpwanted

Need to triage bugs to meet the glidepath for pr3

Comment 10

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, >=5 years untouched DOM/Storage bugs' priority.

If you have reason to believe this is wrong (especially for the severity), please write a comment and ni :jstutte.