Re: The Conflicting Notions of Ease of Use and Need for Authoring Tools

On Dec 28, 2004, at 22:48, Daniel Glazman wrote:

> I can easily prove the above : the biggest problem in Nvu - or in any 
> wysiwyg editor that would like to implement CSS-generated styles - 
> right now is
> certainly the way the Object Model gives access to the styles. From a 
> given
> real style "this element's font weight is bold", it's just impossible 
> to
> retrieve the rule that caused that style. So it's impossible to really 
> *MODIFY*
> the styles of an arbitrary document, it's only possible to *OVERRIDE* 
> them
> using style attributes, !important, or artifically 
> specificity-increased [2]
> rules. As a side-effect, the current CSS Object Model and the 
> impossibility
> to reverse the cascade is one of the main reasons why we need the style
> attribute, despite of what all the XML-everywhere fanatics keep saying.

That assumes that it is (in the tradition of MacWrite and the like) 
appropriate to select a range of text and apply some style properties 
to that range as opposed to the UI exposing the style sheet for editing 
on one hand and the document structure on the other.

I, for one, would like to have an editor that was split into a markup 
editor and a style sheet editor in such a way the actions I took in the 
markup editor would be guaranteed not to change any style (neither a 
separate CSS file not a style attribute) and actions I took in the 
style sheet editor would be guaranteed not to change any markup. The 
editors should, however, have functions that answered the questions: 
"Which elements are matched by this selector?" and "Which style rules 
apply to this element?" (I believe Gecko can already answer both 
questions. At least DOM Inspector answers the latter.)

As for selections, I like the way Mathematica handles selection. 
(Inline selections only work within a block and selections of blocks 
are visualized differently.)

(Yes, I realize that I am not the target customer of Linspire.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/

Received on Sunday, 2 January 2005 13:30:58 UTC