Matthew Thomas wrote:
> In Internet Explorer (and Microsoft Office apps by default), if you
> select across a word boundary, you automatically select the entire word.
Someone at Microsoft must have thought that was pretty odd behavior, because
in IE 5 for mac (which came after the win version), you get the "classic"
selection model: select what I say to select.
>
> Composer should work like that,
> for HTML elements rather than words or bits of math. As soon as you
> select outside the boundary of an element, you select the entire element.
While I'm not sure I agree with you for Composer (and certain we shouldn't do
that in mail compose), I do agree that there should be an easy way to do
element selection in Composer while in the normal view. You can do it now by
switching to tag view and clicking on the tag graphics, but we need a ui for
this in normal view as well.
> > > If so, that is a bug. You can't have two elements with the same id
> > > <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-id>.
> >
> > Sorry, copy/paste error. I meant to turn into classes or style attr.
>
> Well, ok, if you do *that* the bugs will be just as bad. Scripts which
> look for the element with id="worple" will not be able to find it. And
> [...]
And scripts which assume a certain element is at a certain {parent,offset}
will fail regardless in the face of editing. There is no such thing as a
change you can make to a document that is certain to preserve the correct
functionality of all scripts. The important thing is have reasonably
learnable and predictable behavior so that script users can anticipate the
trouble spots.
What's scarier than scripts are just the style sheets themselves. If you
really try to be wysiwyg, you need to be omniscient about the entire set of
style rules on the document. Some text is red somewhere because of a class?
Want it to be red where the user pastes it? Good luck. Style rules may
cause it to be blue if you keep the same class (because of it's new position
in the document). They may cause it to be blue even if you specifically
abandon the class and use the appropriate css style on the span. The mere
presence of the new span may cause content outside of what you pasted to
change after the paste.
CSS is just a nightmare for wysiwyg editing, as far as I can see.
So there are two ways to go:
1) Make a css editor that is the sticky gooey dream of most of the readership
here, which is not wysiwyg, but is structure oriented. I agree that it would
be a pleasure to maintain a web site with such a tool if well executed.
2) Make a css editor that is strictly limited in what it can do, limited in
the kinds of style rules it can work with, and is targeted at wysiwyg editing
for people who want rich text and don't care or understand about the format,
as long as it interoperates with their buddies, who (for some reason that
escapes me) are using a css+html format. These folks are using it in mail,
or chat, or something that needs a styled editor, but probalby NOT web page
composing, at least not primarily.
Clearly these two are very different pieces of technology with very different
targets.
I keep being told that the world implied by number 2) above is coming, so we
better be able to support it. But I don't understand *why* it's coming. And
I'm not sure I believe that it *is* coming. But the folks holding the money
bags seem to want 2), and not 1). So if the mozilla community wants
something different, then it will have to come up with the resources to do
it. In the meantime, I have to pay the rent. :-(
> Yes, but people who only care about the rendering and not about the
> structure won't be using Mozilla Composer.
Why is that? Composer is free, it's part of a product that is very visible,
it's on their platform, and it is targeted (at the moment at least) right at
those folks who care about the rendering more than the structure (other than
that the structure be compliant).
> They'll be using the Microsoft Word instead
Word is not free, it's sometimes not on their platform, and there are a lot
of folks who just don't want to use it even if it was the perfect tool. I'm
one of them. And it's not because I'm some microsoft hating fogey (even
though I do work at Netscape!), but because the product is too expensive for
the user I would get from it, and is usually not backwards compatible with
older versions.
