John Levon wrote:
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 09:28:25PM +0300, Martin Vermeer wrote:
Could you list the advantages of an exposed inset UI?
1) You know precisely where a typed character goes -- or where an
already typed character belongs. Inside or outside any given inset.
A special case of this is for blanks, which don't display much in
terms of rendering style.
2) The discipline of nesting is imposed corresponding to the logic of
semantics. Meaning, in the semantic sense, typically forms a tree.
Exceptions to that which I have seen are either more or less
pathological, or esoteric.
3) No ambiguity about nesting order.
I'm confused about the difference between 2 and 3. They sound like the
same thing: an inset UI enforces, clearly, a hierarchical style tree.
4) Because of 2) and 3), no problems with our favourite back-ends, LaTeX
and XML.
I presume you're referring the specific case of getting certain style
"ligatures" wrong when you have to decompose a non-hierarchical style
system into a hier one, right? Otherwise it sounds like you're talking
about implementation.
Here are the user interface advantages I have for a ranges UI:
1) familiarity. This is how every other editor I'm familiar with works.
This one is not an argument for me. Otherwise I'd still use MS Word.
In particular problems like "what happens if I have some text with style
selected, and choose another style" can be solved in the same fashion as
other programs, when it makes sense
Most of those use cases can be dealt with elegantly and unambiguously
with inset.
2) The existence of a style attribute does not affect how and where I
can select text
This is a con for me. I want to select the whole charstyle automatically
and not bother with micro selection.
3) Selection never 'jumps' - it always starts at the point I started,
and ends at the nearest character to the position of the pointer
Same thing. I consider the jumps a plus.
4) all cursor movement is based upon what I can see
Same thing :-)
5) Line-wrapping looks and behaves naturally.
Easily solved with the "one word per inset" approach or with the 3D
inset. But this is just "look", this doesn't remove anything and is
really not that important.
Note that I'm not listing overlapping styles. I don't think that's an
interesting use case.
One point where we agree ;-)
Abdel.
