[whatwg] Authoring Re: several messages about HTML5

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 16:37 -0500 UTC, on 2007-02-25, Adrian Sutton wrote:

[...]

> Dave Ragget wrote:
>> 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.

Might this not be solvable by having browsers let users use external editors?
(I have this vague notion that OmniWeb offers this, but I may be wrong.) The
big 'trick' that would be involved would be to have the editor automatically
pipe everything back to the browser. I don't know about Windows, but on a
unix system that concept isn't alien. Mac OS X would also have AppleEvents
available for this. (I don't know enough about other OSs.)

It's a more general problem anyway. Not just for inline editors, but for any
text area. The editing possibilities are always much poorer than what
dedicated editors offer, and people may be used to.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>