Re: [g-a-devel] Exposing document selection

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Aaron:

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 10:52 -0400, Aaron Leventhal wrote:
> Here is the current plan for exposing selection in documents -- please 
> let me know if there is a better way:
> 
> 1. Any object which has any part in the document selection will have 
> STATE_SELECTED, which will allow the collection interface to be used to 
> get all the currently selected nodes.

STATE_SELECTED is usually reserved for objects such as interactive lists
that let their children be selected (versus a portion of their text).  

The use of STATE_SELECTED for this purpose, however, seems to work well
if only to use the collection interface to provide a semi-efficient
means to find all objects that have something selected, whether it is
text or children.  I'm confused, however, about what happens when both
types of selection are intended.  My guess about what to do here is in
the next section...

> 2. We will use the AccessibleText interface to expose selection via 
> getNSelections and getSelection for each container in the document which 
> has text. The document itself is currently also one such container, 
> which supports AccessibleText.

This is workable.  What happens in the case of things like list items in
an interactive list, though?  That is, how does one represent that they
are both selected as in the "I want this list item" means and that their
text is part of a selection?

I guess what one needs to do is look to the parent's Accessible
Selection interface to see if it is SELECTED because of the Selection
interface and/or to the Accessible Text interface to see if it is
SELECTED because of Accessible Text.  Is that the intention?

> 3. Any accessible node which has any descendant even partially selected 
> will be considered selected.

In the case where a non-text node has text descendants (do these cases
even exist) that have a text selection, I'm guessing the non-text node
will be marked as SELECTED?

Furthermore, will the Gecko implementation work the other way around?
That is, I'm hoping the assistive technology can call the accessible
text implementation to *modify* selections as well.  If so, will the
implementation set all the appropriate SELECTED states for ancestors?

Thanks!

Will