1. _Only_ tool bar As long as it doesn't contain too many features on it, say more than 20, a tool bar is the best solution for me. It wont lead to a dialog box overload if they are modal and we use wizards. But anyway, the dialog box "problem" is not a consequence of the _only_ tool bar solution. In order to scale, a tool bar must be complemented by something else to put the extra, not so common, features. This _something else_ could be provided by the other two solutions proposed. 2. Menu bar & tool bar The extra features are organized in a menu bar, which could be detached through configuration thus obtaining a light editor for smaller text areas. I don't think the menus would require extensive cross-browser testing to make sure everything works fine, and I don't think things might break more easily. I believe there are way to organize the menus efficiently, from the usability point of view. This solution must be further complemented by modal dialog boxes (and wizards). 3. Tabs, each with its own tool bar I don't find it modern because I have the feeling I've seen it in old 80's screen shots. Rediscovering the past is not bad, as long as we value the usability. Speaking of which, here's some of the things I don't like: * Because we can't know a priori the size of the editor (depends on the client needs) we can't limit the size of the "dialog boxes" to the size of the editor. Scroll bars are out of discussion in this case. For the same reason, I don't think the inspector and chat panels will scale. The user will end up wanting to resize horizontally this panels. What will then happen with the tabs and the text area?.. * The dialog boxes will cover the text area without allowing the user to move them in order to see the text while filling the specific dialog form. In the menu-bar solution, even though the dialog boxes are modal, they can be moved (they are not "physically" bound to the menus that trigger them). * I can't see how it will degrade to a light editor for smaller text areas. * Some of our clients might not need all the features and we might end up giving them an editor with 6 tabs, each with 2 sub-features. In other words, a great editor should scale gracefully from 1 feature to 100 (organized in menu, tags or whatever). * I don't think having a default tab and returning "blindly" to it after each action is smart. What if I want to repeat my last action? Hope this will trigger some thoughts, Marius gathered right clashes on a assume and _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs(a)xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

I like it. However, the way we group the features in the menu bar is very important. I think we should find the right balance between putting every option in the menu and putting every option in the associated dialog/wizard.

For instance I think it would be wrong to have an Import menu with entries for any file format you could think of, as it would be wrong to have a single Import button opening a dialog/wizard with options for any of those file formats. One solution I can think of is to have a menu entry like "Import Office Documents" which opens a dialog/wizard from where you can select what kind of Office document you want to import.

In the same way, we could have a single "Link to Document" menu entry with an option on the dialog to create the document if it doesn't exist.

Guillaume, you should know that in the end the layout (what features and in what order) of the tool bar, menu bar, tab bar, or whatever we'll decide on, will not be hard-coded but read from the configuration. For instance, the layout of the tool bar could be specified as: "Bold Italics Strikethrough Underlined | BulletedList NumberedList | ..."