Unquiet

Look closely at the selected text in the first image.

Now look closely at the same text in this image. Notice anything different?

Apparently a side-effect of the new content editing abilities in Apple’s WebKit is that even text that is _not editable_ is actually **editable**. Don’t follow? Select some of the text on this here weblog (while in the Safari browser in Mac OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4) and go to **Safari / Services / Convert** - if you have that, it doesn’t seem to be in a standard Services menu. Choose **ROT13**. Boom - the text is ROT13-encoded. Pressing Command-Z (Undo) will revert your changes.

But note that none of the text on this blog has `contenteditable=’true’` set.

Now try selecting some text and making it bold or italic using Command-B and Command-I. Doesn’t work. Apple only enables those shortcuts for editable content. However, I’ve seen a few other sites using the `execCommand` method in Javascript to create “buttons” that do the same thing, even to non-editable text.

So what does this mean? Nothing, really. It’s just an odd consequence of the underlying technology. Apple didn’t close off the editing door completely, and so Services and JavaScript commands can make changes even where they probably shouldn’t. But does it have any implications? I don’t know.