- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 23:47:50 +0100
Ian Hickson wrote: > On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Ryan Johnson wrote: > >>3) Extensible syntax highlighting (coloring). I am aware that a ton of >>code editors don't even do this well. The ability to load a syntax >>definition file and have it color a block of code would do wonders for >>making the web a more friendly place to script. > > > This is hard. ;-) Would be nice though. Noted for Web Apps. I was having thoughts about a somewhat similar feature - the ability to specify a input 'language' for a text-area and possibly to specify a subset of language elements allowed. This would principally be for situations in which the input was text supplemented by a markup language such as (x)html, textile, bbcode or similar. Providing this information would allow the UA to provide word-processor-like editing controls for the textarea. Allowing the specification of a particular subset of the language (e.g. html, 'a' elements only, 'href' and 'lang' attributes only) would allow the UI to be further refined. Clearly one would need a set of default language profiles to ship with the UA. A good implementation might allow the set of profiles to be easily extended. There would need to be a mechanism for storing and fetching the information about the allowed subset of the language. From the point of view of the textarea, this would require two new attributes - inputformat and inputprofile where inputformat is a string/uri identifying the language being used and inputprofile is a URI pointing at a resource describing the subset of the language that is allowed. This is not the difficult part, however. The difficult part is finding a suitable format for describing the allowed subset. For XML-like languages (HTML, BBcode, etc.) DTD or some other schema format might be appropriate (but might be too complex?). For other types of languages like 'magic character' languages (textile, wiki formats), it's not quite so clear what would work (one could avoid supporting these formats in the hope that with a good enough editing environment, people might use plain HTML but that might be a mistaken hope). There is some evidence that this functionality is desired - for example the BBCode addon for Firefox [1] I'm not expecting anything to come of this unless someone can convince me it's much easier to implement than it appears. [1] http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/bbcode -- "If anybody ever tells you that you?re using the language incorrectly, just yell 'prescriptive grammarian!' at the top of your voice and all the linguists in the building will run over and surround the guy... and then they?ll rough him up"
Received on Wednesday, 30 June 2004 15:47:50 UTC