*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
was still a link. She felt confused and didn't understand why the link was
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.*
*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 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
- 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.
WDYT?
Guillaume
--
Guillaume Lerouge
Product Manager - XWiki
Skype: wikibc
Twitter: glerouge
http://guillaumelerouge.com/