Joe Francis wrote:
>
> 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.
I don't think that augurs anything in particular, since IE/Mac doesn't
seem to have copied behavior from IE/Windows in anything much (unless
you count the `Tools' menu).
But if you think it does, then ... In Microsoft Word 2001 for Mac (which
came after IE 5 for Mac), you get the word-by-word selection model by default.
Note that I'm not arguing for word selection (since that is often
annoying where you want to rearrange the grammar of a sentence, where
grammar is stored in chunks that don't respect word boundaries), but for
element selection (which would *help* you rearrange the grammar of a sentence).
>...
> 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.
>...
See the current thread `A "VisiCalc" for the Web?' in
<news:comp.human-factors>. Such a structure-based editor could do for
HTML and XML what VisiCalc did for numbers; or it could be a complete fizzler.
My pick is the former.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA
Mozilla UI decisions made within 48 hours, or the next one is free
