Hi Marius, On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi Guillaume,
Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
*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?
No. She didn't expect the link to be carried over when hitting Return. The style issue is simply an aggravating factor.
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.*
Open Office Writer does the same, and not for technical reasons, I guess. Are their users complaining?
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.
*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?
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).
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.
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
Marius
WDYT?
Guillaume
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