[whatwg] Authoring Re: several messages about HTML5

[Adrian Sutton]

> Indeed, and that is why it takes a lot of time, and study of
> existing tools. With that in mind do you have any suggestions for
> what tools I should look at?

Not overly as it depends on which area of the editor you're currently
interested in and various other factors. The biggest thing to check
against is Word since it is basically the editor that everyone knows.
Word does a lot of stupid things too so you don't want to copy it
directly. Experience with users is what you really need and I can't
recommend enough finding ways to use the editor in real world situations
as much as possible - we use ours as the editor for our wiki so it sees
a lot of usage.

> I agree. Some short cuts are common place, whilst others seem to be
> very specific to the particular tool. Another challenge for browser
> based editors is that the browsers define their own short cuts and
> the editor needs to be a good citizen. The problem is that browsers
> vary considerably in what short cuts they provide. Opera in
> particular provides a great deal. This risks interfering with the
> conventional short cuts for editors, and something I will have to
> look into very carefully.

I feel your pain with having to avoid browser defined shortcuts. The
advantage of being a Java applet is that when we have focus our
shortcuts override the browsers - except on Mac. We have no end of
complaints from Mac users that the keyboard shortcuts use control
instead of command, but it's the only way we can realistically avoid the
browser's shortcuts and still leverage off of the users existing
knowledge of shortcuts. For a JavaScript editor you may need to use this
"different modifier" trick on all platforms. Users definitely love their
shortcuts though.

Regards,

Adrian Sutton.