multi-line text and scrollpane

I though this discussion would be more appropriate on the list so others
can have their input.

>From bug 320 ( http://bugs.xwt.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320 ):
> ------- Additional Comment #2 From Charles Goodwin 2004-01-05 17:42
> Does this depend on bug 390 or will we be mandating that people make
> it scrollable by doing:
> 
> <scroll>
>    <text />
> </scroll>
> 
> ------- Additional Comment #3 From David Crawshaw 2004-01-05 17:56
> There will definitely be a template in xwt.widget that provides a
> textfield with scrollbars and all the 
> works. How the internal design works, I'm not sure yet.
> 
> I hope to wrap most of the theme-specific code into xwt.theme.text
> (the meat of xwt.widget.label), and move the multiline packing 
> algorithm into a HTML renderer. This will probably involve the 
> namespace xwt.html, but I'll take a look when I get something closer 
> to working.
> 
> In all likeliness xwt.html will depend on xwt.theme (for rendering 
> forms, etc). However, I want to aviod xwt.widget or xwt.theme 
> referencing xwt.html. That way it's a package dependent on but 
> seperable to the widget library.

Hmm.  I don't think text flow should be performed by something from 
xwt.html but it should be part of the widget library.  It instead should 
be something extended upon by xwt.html.

I would have thought that mltext[1] would want to take into account 
having arbitrarily sized boxes that it should encompass or wrap around.
That would actually provide a lot of functionality required by flowing 
text for xwt.html and would be very useful for the widget library (things 
like inserting pictures into text).

[1] a short name for multi-line text - sltext for single-line text

As for the template that provides 'all the works', I think that should be
only the rtf widget.  I think sltext, mltext and labels shouldn't include 
scrollpane because it's incredibly easy to manually include it and would 
be more flexible that way (there'll probably be cases where people want 
mltext without scrollbars).

Anyway, those are my incoherent thoughts on the matter. ;)

- Charlie

-- 
Charles Goodwin <[email protected]>
Member of the XWT Foundation

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