Re: RichTextInput03

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> Anyway, http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#accept  
> should address what you ask for, although I think people will want to  
> have a bit more control over how such an editor works.

Thanks for reminding this very relevant attribute from WHATWG spec.

Which makes me think, maybe we can have the best of all worlds:

* When scripting is available, then the user would be presented
   with UI crafted by page author.

* When an appropriate editor for specified content-type is available,
   then the user would be presented with that editor.

* When both are available, then the user can make a choice, which one
   to use.

* When neither is available, then the user would be presented with
   a simple textarea. Additionally there should be an option for user
   to switch into the simplest plain-text-mode even when special
   editor or UI script is available.

That way neither the page author is limited with the choice of
publicly available editors, nor the user is limited with the
editor provided by page author.

Opening specialized editor for a specific content type is pretty
easy to implement - OmniWeb already has a builtin way to switch from
textarea to text editor [1], Elinks, w3m and lynx also support
external editors, and there are is bunch of extensions to achieve
the same in Firefox (WiewSourceWith [2] and Mozex [3] to name a few).

The more complex part is providing some kind of general mechanism
to switch into and out of an editor created with some author-crafted
script. To make this kind of switching available, the user-agent
must understand which script on the page is responsible for the
editor. This information could either be provided through some API
or with some additional attribute on textarea, e.g.:

   <textarea accept="text/css" editor="cssedit.js"></textarea>


Rene Saarsoo

[1] http://www.omnigroup.com/images/images-5/features/ZoomEditor.png
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=394
[3] http://mozex.mozdev.org/

Received on Tuesday, 27 March 2007 20:59:04 UTC