Good ideas in MS Word
By glazou on Tuesday 13 January 2004, 15:18 - Nvu - Permalink
You have one dialog for let's say border properties. The user may use that dialog to draw a border around the containing block of the selection or the selection itself. But how can I make the difference between the two requests? MS Word has the solution: if the selection is collapsed, that's for the containing block; otherwise that's for the selection. Very cool.
Comments
Careful, there may be a patent for that
All elements must have a containing block. Otherwise, how can you set a good margin-left in Konqueror for a Header with 'display:inline' (etc. etc.)? You have to rebuild Composer from scratch, from another point of view. To draw fluid layouts that works in all browsers you have to use tons of DIVs!
If a user wants a Header with a text-decoration:underline in mind (just for the text, not for the entire width of the containing layer) and he's not a CSS guru, the command is 'Header 3', or 'Header 4', but when he pushes the button HEADER 3 ...the code must have:
<div>
<h3 style="text-decoration:underline">Title of a paragraph</h3>
</div>
If he double-clicks the Header, the Advanced Properties dialog must have two parts: one for the inline formatting and one for the containing block. Etc. for all other tags. NVU should be an editor for pages that works fine in all browsers, not only in Gecko. You must have fluid layouts in mind, not tables...
You have to develop a tool to help 600 million users in publishing their web sites despite they don't know what to do to work around browser inmpatibilities (and bugs). They can't read every day Zeldman.com, and Meyerweb.com, etc.
If te web development remains a 'divertissement' for few CSS Guru, the 'crisi' of Information Technology Market is far from being finished...
You are the only developer on the Planet Earth that is able to build a cross-platform WYSIWYG Editor based on Mozilla. You have a great 'responsability': ...imagine what happens to the Open Source community if Opera Software adds a visual editor to its browser. Or if Apple-Microsoft make the same with Safari... (which has just a sufficient conformance with CSS, but it's enough to display any kind of fluid layouts: alias 'what-a-non-Geek-wants-for-his-personal-web-site)
Of course - for the example above - to set the margin, the Advanced Properties dialog must have a command like ...'Margin-left: TOT', but the code in the source is for the containing DIV:
div#spaghetti { margin-left: 5% }
All HTML elements must have a DIV around, but if you want an 'XML/XSL-like' environment, I suggest: use tons of SPANs with CSS classes (and don't say: it's not semantic, please!)
ROFL!!!!!! Sorry, I could not resist!!!!
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