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?
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?
*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?
- 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
WDYT?
Guillaume