In 2020 and 2021 we helped the Google Rendering team with specification tests for several things, including improving the interoperability of the “plaintext-only” value.

Google

Helping browsers to maintain consistent behavior when working with plaintext

Challenge

We submitted spec PRs to define contenteditable=“plaintext-only” for HTML and for the editing spec, along with wpt tests. We also updated tests for the contenteditable IDL attribute and we identified that Safari and Chrome was using the non-standard “-webkit-user-modify” property to implement contenteditable=“plaintext-only”, so we wrote wpt tests to verify it’s unsupported.

Solution

We updated browser issues (Chromium, WebKit and Gecko) and filed an MDN change. The PRs are currently awaiting review.

Impact

When the change is implemented, this should allow browsers to maintain consistent behavior when working with plaintext content and events inside text editors. Gecko should get improved web compatibility from supporting the “plaintext-only” value, and interoperability between WebKit and Chromium will improve (e.g., handling of newlines).