Comment by yjftsjthsd-h
1 day ago
No, it's still a weird scope creep. Browsers can view a lot of things (HTML document, various pictures, sounds, videos), but they don't typically include editing functionality.
1 day ago
No, it's still a weird scope creep. Browsers can view a lot of things (HTML document, various pictures, sounds, videos), but they don't typically include editing functionality.
<html contenteditable> has existed since IE 5.5, and was standardized in the first version of HTML5.
https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable
> they don't typically include editing functionality.
Not true. The original Mozilla Internet Suite was a combined browser, email/newsgroups client, and web-page editor. It was an open-sourced version of Netscape Communicator which did the same things. Seamonkey is the modern fork.
Firefox is the result of a project to cut down the Mozilla suite to something smaller, simpler and more focused, but its parent program and direct ancestor edited text, HTML, and did other read/write stuff like messaging, calendaring, etc.
The first web browser was also an editor (albeit not for PDFs). Accessible editing was a part of was Berners-Lee's vision for the web.
> The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web.[1]
[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
I stand by the statement. Modern browsers typically do not include all that functionality. For instance, consider... well, as you say - Firefox supposedly was the cut down version that didn't include all that stuff. If Mozilla wants to make seamonkey a major part of their product suite, I'd be basically on board with that, but that thing's niche.
It's an editor, just one that you can program in JavaScript.
Remember WordPerfect? When you press F12 in Firefox, you have essentially the same thing as the reveal codes pane in WP.
Browsers can fill out forms. Many forms are (unfortunately) PDFs, especially for orgs that are struggling to digitize (govts...). PDFs which then need to be filled out.
So this seems to make a lot of sense to me and I'll be glad to have the functionality, especially when PDF functionality is such a mess in the general world (lots of barely-working software).
This seems like an arbitrary line to draw. Should your photo viewing software also not provide editing tools? If it's useful, why not?