Re: RichTextInput03

T.V Raman wrote:
> The net of that work was that we discovered that by factoring the
> data model from the view, and attaching type information to the
> data, we could get away with a small number of generic controls
>  and leave it to browsers to pick the right user experience. 
>
> As an example, this is why XForms did not need to define an
> explicit date-picker control, or have to wrestle with what that
> user interface should look like on different devices. Instead,
> that design binds a generic input control 
> <input ref="birthdate"><label>Enter Birthdate</label></input>
>
> and leaves it to the UA to pick the best possible end-user
> experience; the UA figures out that you need a date picker
> because the input control binds to a data node of type "date".
>
> We could do rich controls and many other specialized controls the
> same way --- notice that as far as "edit UI" goes, all one needs
> to standardize is how the user generated content gets serialized
> and submitted.
>
> So for instance, if you're creating a "Web Forum" webapp --- and
>  want to store the user generated cotnent as HTML,
> you should not have to force your users to type the kind of HTML
>  you expect. Instead, you should be able to specify that what you
>  accept is a given vocabulary -- e.g. XHTML-1.0,
> and leave it to the browser to generate that from wiki-like input
>  if the browser thinks that to be a useful feature.
>   
While I tend to agree with what you are saying in principle, I think 
there needs to be a balance. If you provide no guidance in the spec for 
really common use cases, you end of with chaos such as widely differing 
implementations in competing contexts (i.e. Firefox vs. IE) or no 
effective implementations at all. The chaos for the latter comes as 
website and CMS authors tried to augment the lack of functionality 
provided by the browsers, and they all do it quite differently. 
Providing some direction on really common use cases such as 
RichtextInput03 would be beneficial IMO.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us
"It never ceases to amaze how many people will proactively debate away attempts to improve the web..."

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2007 16:13:01 UTC