Intent to Prototype: FormControlRange Interface

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Andres Regalado Rosas

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Jul 22, 2025, 1:49:20 PMJul 22
to blin...@chromium.org, Leo Lee, Daniel Clark, Ana Sollano Kim, Taylore Givens, Stephanie Zhang
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Explainer
Specification
None

Summary
FormControlRange, a new type of Range object that extends AbstractRange and serves as a way to reference spans of text within form control elements without exposing implementation-defined shadow tree structures of those elements.

Blink component
Motivation
Currently, developers are unable to get bounding rects or use the custom highlight API for text inside <input> or <textarea> elements. As a result, if developers want to do these things they must avoid <input> and <textarea> and resort to workarounds involving <div> elements to simulate input behavior. These workarounds lack built-in accessibility, native form behavior, and they require additional JavaScript to simulate basic input functionality. In contrast, FormControlRange allows them to get text bounding rects and set custom highlights directly with native form elements without reimplementing input behavior or manually managing accessibility concerns.

Initial public proposal
TAG review
None

TAG review status
Pending

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility
None

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: Positive (https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/10346)

Other signals:

WebView application risks
Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?
None

Debuggability
No specific DevTools changes required.

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
No
Not currently tested, but tests will be added as part of feature development.

Flag name on about://flags
None

Finch feature name
Pending

Non-finch justification
A flag will be added as part of feature development.

Requires code in //chrome?
False

Tracking bug
Estimated milestones
No milestones specified

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

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