Yes +1 This is exactly what I had in mind too.
And yes we should make the control reusable for navigating to any page quickly. Thanks -Vincent On Oct 30, 2008, at 2:40 PM, Marta Girdea wrote: > Hi everyone, > > Here's my (late) reaction to the discussion about managing links in > the new > wysiwyg: > > All the proposals target users who are XWiki beginners and need > guidance in > their actions. This is good, of course, for a newbie it's the right > approach, but a more experienced user will be *very* annoyed with > all the > clicking and tabbing and browsing that is necessary in order to > create a > link. Experienced users should also have the right to use the wysiwyg > without being slowed down by all the help it offers. > > Consequently, I would propose to provide two ways of creating the > link. In > the dedicated dialog, there should be two areas (sorry i didn't make a > drawing): > - top: a small zone for those who know what they are doing, with a > single > input endowed with a "smart" suggest feature. > - under it, a bigger zone containing one of the proposed complex > selection > interfaces. In my opinion, this zone should be collapsed for > advanced users. > > Here's an example that illustrates how the link input would work. > When the > user starts writing "de" in the input, the suggestions will include > all > wikis, spaces from the current wiki and pages from the current space > that > start with "de", for example in this form: > *de*v: > *De*velopment. > CurrentSpace.*De*tails > (For experienced users, it will be obvious that what ends with ":" > is a > virtual wiki, what ends with "." is a space in the current wiki, > etc. Maybe > some color codes can be used in the suggestion list to help them to > quickly > spot what they need, and, for a "richer" experience, the different > fragments > of the path can be displayed in the input with that color, for > example: > purple for wikis, blue for spaces, green for pages. The same color > codes > could be used in the beginner's zone as well.) > > If the user chooses "dev:", then at that point we start suggesting, > according to the user's input, spaces from that wiki, and so on. Also, > whenever the user hits ":" (not necessarily by choosing explicitly > one of > the suggestions), we realize that so far he specified a virtual > wiki, and > start making suggestions of spaces from that wiki. > > So, basically, this is addressed to users that know the syntax of an > internal wiki link, know where they want to link, and just want to > type it > quickly. > > (offtopic: such an input would also be very useful for implementing > Vincent's idea XWIKI-1485). > > Of course, the user may be wrong and try to point to a page that > does not > exist. He will be informed about the mistake with a small warning > somewhere > around the input, but he will be allowed to continue (maybe he knows > what > he's doing; otherwise he would have used the wizard :) ). > > A complex selection interface is very necessary and can under no > circumstances be replaced by this toy, but, in my opinion, if the > beginners > are properly helped by it and shown the result of their actions, > some may > start to understand how to write the paths without all the guidance > and end > up preferring to use the more simple and quick variant. I'm thinking > that > maybe the two (the input and the selector) should be at all time > "synchronized". I'm aware that probably there's not enough time to do > everything before 1.7, but imo this approach would really boost the > usability for all categories of users. > _______________________________________________ > devs mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
