21 Aug
2009
21 Aug
'09
2:53 p.m.
Hi Marius,
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea <
mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
The actual issue takes place when the caret is at the very end of the link.
The link is carried over to the next line without a visual clue (whereas
when bold is carried over the bold button in the toolbar is shown as
selected).
As I stated it above, I think differentiating the behavior of links vs bold
and other inline styles would be our best option. Having all styles not
carried over is a second-rank optimum, but it's still better than the
current one.
What's your opinion from a technical point of view?
Guillaume
Hi Guillaume,
Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
No. She didn't expect the link to be carried over when hitting Return. The
style issue is simply an aggravating factor.
*Hi Devs,*
*I'm coming back from a meeting with a corporate XWiki user.*
*The project manager there reported a "bug" to me: when hitting Return
while
at the end of the link, she was still in the
link. The item she created
after hitting return was a title and due to style settings she couldn't
see
it was still a link. Then she hit Return again
and after her title the
text
"due to style settings" -> isn't this the real issue? was still a link. She felt confused and didn't
understand why the link was
I have no idea. What I know is that our users are complaining about the
current behavior.
My initial suggestion was that links should be treated differently from
inline styles such as bold or italics. This is what Google Docs does. Anca
was strongly against it for conceptual - "all inline items should act in the
same way" - and technical - "they currently share the same behavior, it
makes more code to write" - reasons.
This is still the solution I would favor. If however it can't be done, we
have to examine the next best choice. This is why I'm proposing we don't
carry over any inline style upon hitting Return.
still there.*
*This is due to the fact that right now, when the caret is at the end of
an
element with an inline style applied, it keeps
applying that style upon
hitting Return. This applies to bold, italics, underlined, strikethrough,
color, background color and links (all inline elements). I've talked
about
this with Anca a number of times, saying that it
was wrong for links to
be
kept when hitting enter (since users very rarely
want links that span 2
paragraphs). Her answer was that all inline styles should be treated the
same for technical reasons.*
Open Office Writer does the same, and not for technical reasons, I
guess. Are their users complaining? *After giving
it more thought and gathering feedback from our project
managers it appears that the use case of willing the current inline style
to
be kept after hitting Return is actually less
frequent than wanting the
new
line to be "clean". Moreover, it's
extremely confusing for users when the
link is kept.*
*Thus I'd like to suggest that hitting Return (= generating a new
paragraph)
should get the caret out of the current inline
style in the WYSIWYG
editor.
Here are a couple more reasons why I believe this
to be the best option:*
- There are shortcuts available in the WYSIWYG
for most inline styles
(CTRL-B, CTRL-I) thus it's easy for the user to activate it again on a
new
line
It's hard to have shortcuts for a specific font name, font size, font
color or highlight color.
- It's very easy to select a wide area of
text with the mouse and then
apply an inline style to it, thus styling can conveniently be done
after the
actual writing
Then how difficult it is to choose ***Remove Link*** from the link menu
when the caret is inside a link? From all the cases I saw, the user model / expectation
when hitting Return
while the caret is at the end of a link is that the link should
NOT be
carried over. Going to the link menu to remove the link doesn't seem
intuitive to our users when they start using the editor. If we want to make
our editor easier to use for the majority of our users, links should not be
carried over when hitting Return. It's not my choice, simply a fact derived
from observation.
If you think I'm wrong, please provide us with a compelling use case where
the user wants his / her link to be carried over after hitting Return.
- Hitting SHIFT-Return will keep the user in
the same paragraph and
thus
will keep the current inline styles
- It's very rare that users want to apply an inline style to several
paragraphs in a row since bold, italics are most often used to create
contrast with surrounding text
To summarize, I think hitting Return should generate "virgin" new lines.
The
only thing that should be kept is the alignment.
I'm pretty sure others will scream because their nice style is lost when
they move to a new paragraph. Anyway, I'm going to implement it if
others think too that Open Office does it wrong.
Marius
--
Guillaume Lerouge
Product Manager - XWiki
Skype: wikibc
Twitter: glerouge
http://guillaumelerouge.com/
WDYT?
Guillaume
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