Bug 12551 – ER: Make public the API to WebViewEditingInMail

• Status: NEW
• Component: WebKit API

[piet]

I'm working on an application that needs to behave like Apple Mail when composing a reply: if the user types Return inside the quoted message, the quoted content is broken in two parts, the cursor is inserted in-between and any character typed by the user is no longer part of the quoted content.

To implement this behavior, Apple Mail currently uses a category implemented in WebView, called WebViewEditingInMail, that defines 4 methods, one of which is _insertNewlineInQuotedContent which calls insertParagraphSeparatorInQuotedContent. 

The problem is that WebViewEditingInMail is a private interface, part of WebViewPrivate.h

Could you please make this interface public? Other editor applications might benefit from it too.

Note: the method '_insertNewlineInQuotedContent' expects the quoted content to be within a BLOCKQUOTE with TYPE="cite". While the developers of a generic editor might appreciate being able to specify which elements should or should not be broken on the user typing Return, I could very much live with this limitation - no problem.

[piet]

I understand that a change of API isn't likely to happen anytime soon, so could someone in the Apple Mail team please suggest me her/his best bet as of how to implement this behavior?

Rest assured that if it's broken one day by a change of your private APIs, it will not crash our application, just degrade a little bit its behavior, so no big problem.

[Robert Blaut]

Confirmed as an enhancement request.