On 06/29/2010 11:41 PM, RobG wrote:
Yeah, and that is going to be tricky in a wysiwyg math editor,
But for some reason not that tricky in browser-based wysiwig HTML
editors.
but I used to handle that so ... eventually. The backstory is
that in the past I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours
implementing drag-select, cut-and-paste, etc etc and I am pretty
sure that that was a waste of time for an Algebra basics tutorial.
Kids just will not use cut/paste for -3x-2>13. yet the
development cost is extraordinary. Hell, i am not even worried
about letting them click to position the cursor.
The moral is: without an unlimited budget (meaning, "always")
do not implement cool feature X until a good number of people
(other than JS library haters) ask for it.
<snip>
That would be a conclusion that suggest you haven't understood what
you have done. The standard HTML input field had support for delete,
navigation (of characters, words, etc.) by keyboard, home, end, insert/
overwrite, cursor positioning by mouse, drag selection, copy, paste,
etc., etc. And usually using OS native idioms familiar to the user
form their experience with other software in that environment. All of
this built-in, handled by the browser and available at precisely zero
effort to the javascript programmer. (And that is without even
considering features such as - contentEditable - and the like for non-
form control elements.)
If you are working in a browser and you don't have these facilities
then that is not because you haven't bothered to make the effort to
put them in, it is because you made some effort to design them out.
And not appreciating that suggest you designed them about without
realising that you were doing so, which is probably true as you were
determined to disregard the warnings you were given about qooxdoo when
you first proposed using it. And it is the decision (your decision,
despite advice to the contrary) to use qooxdoo is the point where you
designed a whole host of useful/desirable features out of your
product.
The qooxdoo approach, of attempting to do away with the browser's
HTML, and its accompanying layout and presentation facilities in
favour of a fully scripted alternative is initially appealing because
it allows a (superficial) level of direct control over the
presentation that does not appear to be available otherwise. Many
people have tried it, and given up when they realised the depth of the
problems they were creating for themselves. These problems include,
but are fare from limited to, recreating all of the (familiar, to the
user) keyboard interaction features that the browser would have been
providing for free. These things are difficult to script, especially
when you consider their full range, the differences in styles between
OS, alternative input methods (e.g. Tablet PC's handwriting input
methods), alternative keyboard layouts and accessibility generally. So
the creators of libraries that attempt to provide a fully scripted
user interface don't tend to provide these things, because they have
avoided the HTML provided facilities and, either out of ignorance of
their existence, the extent of their existence, the inability to
implement them or the realisation that implementing them will bloat
and slow their product to the point where it will be seen as non-
viable, they have done little (or nothing) to script these things back
into their libraries. And this is qooxdoo, there appears to be much
breadth in its set of UI widgets but there is very little depth to
them; they are nowhere near to being finished (in the sense of
providing equivalent facilities to those that the browser would have
provided, if asked to) and the amount of additional code that will be
needed to finish them is not going to help a framework that is already
bulky and slow.
You will, of course, assert that you don't care. But in the end the
reactions to qooxdoo expressed to you in the past are really not just
the knee-jerk reactions of "JS library haters", but are instead, at
least in part, a reaction to an understanding of what qooxdoo is
doing, how far short it is currently falling of achieving what it is
attempting, and that any choice to use it will have considerable
negative consequences (not least in terms of the facilities provided
by any possible user interface).
Richard.
