Explainer

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/FormControlRange/explainer.md

The explainer

• Includes the information requested by the Explainer Explainer.
• Follows the Web Platform Design Principles.
• Includes or links to answers to the Security/Privacy Questionnaire.
• Describes user research you did to validate the problem and/or design.

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

• GitHub repo:

• Primary contacts:

  • Stephanie Zhang (@stephanieyzhang), Microsoft
  • Ana Sollano Kim (@anaskim), Microsoft
  • Dan Clark (@dandclark), Microsoft, tech lead
  • Leo Lee (@leolee), Microsoft, team lead
  • Taylore Givens (@tayloregivens, Microsoft, PM

• Organization/project driving the design: Microsoft Edge

• This work is being funded by: Microsoft

• Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design:

  • WHATWG

• Standards group(s) that you expect to discuss and/or adopt this work when it's ready: WHATWG HTML

Feedback so far

• Multi-stakeholder feedback:
  • Chromium comments: Prototyping
  • Mozilla comments: (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1289)
  • WebKit comments: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/541
• Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this design: None

You should also know that...

Currently, web developers can’t perform range-based operations (e.g., getting bounding rects, setting custom highlights) inside native text controls (<input>, <textarea>). As a result, they often resort to workarounds such as replicating the control and its styles in a contenteditable container and reimplementing input behavior -- an approach that’s tedious and error-prone to keep in sync with native behavior.

FormControlRange is a specialized, live AbstractRange subclass scoped to input/textarea value space. It enables those operations directly in native controls while restricting standard Range mutations to preserve encapsulation. It integrates cleanly with existing selection/editing behavior and closes a long-standing gap for form controls.

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