At 3:12 PM +0200 5/11/00, Ruediger zu Dohna wrote:
>Hi!
>
>It came suddently to my mind, and thinking about it actually makes sense:
>
>Field and background could be synonyms in some MetaCard Version 3.0 or so.
>
>Looks strange at first glance, but give it a thought: You can place
>graphics and buttons and things into fields and text flows around them,
>actually you place them *into* the text so everything scrolls nicely.
>Graphics can be aligned to tab positions or whatever. And you can place
>fields on several cards without having to group them first.
>
>I think this would be cool to have! Is it too dificult to do?
>
>Regards
> Rüdiger
Interesting idea.
If we're going to have a discussion about backgrounds, here's another
thought. (It doesn't preclude Rüdiger's idea.)
In place of the current group/backgrond arrangement, how about a
"background" property for all controls (including groups). When set,
the control can be placed on any card, in the same way as for groups
now. However, at the same time, the control gets a second script;
let's call it the background script. This background script is the
one that is used when any message isn't handled by the card script
(or any objects before).
So if I click on a button that has the background property set, the
buton's "normal" script will get the message first, just like a
regular button. However, if I put a mouseUp handler in the button's
background script, it will only get called after the message has
passed through the button's normal script and then the card script.
This would remove the need for the kind of messy scripting in groups
which is currently required:
"if the owner of the target is me"
(And would remove the nasty surprises when you forget to include that line.)
I can imagine some backwards compatibity problems if implemented, but
the benefits I think would be a clearer and separate concept of
backgrounds and groups.
Cheers
Dave Cragg
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