JTK wrote:
>Ah hell, since I love a good argument, and indeed am a fairly proficient
>software developer:
>
>Blake Ross wrote:
>
>
>[snip]
>
>>>PS. If making a decent text editor is so hard (as judged by you
>>>sarcastic response to my inquiry), why then are there (and always have
>>>been) a plethora of share-/freeware text editors? It seems that every
>>>beginning programmer starts out with programming a text editor.
>>>
>>Because (a) it's not hard to plop down a standard Windows rich textbox
>>control and start extending it (many of those text editors you mention
>>are just frameworks around a standard Windows control, with some added
>>functionality,
>>
>
>So why doesn't Mozilla' news/mail reader do that? "Because we need it
>to be HTML." No you don't, you need it to be able to edit text.
>"Because it's not cross platform.":
>
>#ifdef WINDOWS
>// Use perfectly good system-supplied text edit control and hit 99.44%
>of the market
>#elif MAC
>// Use whatever the Mac has as for a text edit control
>#else
>// Use flakey reinvented wheel for the remaining 0.000001%
>#endif
>
Well, it's in XUL for one, but anyways...we'd still have to do all kinds
of weird sub classing to be able to do proper command handling, etc.,
and I just don't see the point of it. Since Composer would continue to
usea homegrown editor widget anyways (as I'm sure FrontPage does), I'd
just as soon rather see the kinks in the widget worked out. Frankly, I
use mail compose on a daily basis, and I hardly ever run into problems
when composing...it's just that one or two bugs are especially annoying
when you run into them, and thus get blown out of proportion.
Also, your first reason is incorrect, of course html compose needs to
support html ... as for plain text compose, well, that uses the normal
(core) editor widget as far as I know (i.e that used for textfields in
pages...if it doesn't, it probably should), and I never have problems
with that.
>
>I can't think of a single one that has problems editing simple ASCII
>text.
>
See above; html compose does much more. Anyways, you're right, I hardly
ever do either, but that's all I can say since I honestly don't often
run into problems with mail compose (when I do, it's with the quoting
mechanism). This isn't some "mozilla rulz!" blind statement, I'll be
the first to admit that editor never used to do what I want, but it's
much improved now. I have, however, run into plenty of annoying
problems using Outlook Express's html mail compose (which I used to
use), and plenty of problems laying things out using some of editor's
advanced features -- i.e. tables -- in FrontPage.
--Blake
