Re: some points

hello Christian,

welcome back to europe.

> > Is it really impossible to get to any information about the rendered
> > objects?  Don't you need to know where the cursor is in order to make
> > something bold etc.?  Or process an input event to put a character into the
> > xml and rerender?  Or is the BXE working in a completly different way?
> > I would think there *has* to be some positional information which could
> > form the basis for the prescribed cursor.
> 
> Of course you can get the position of the cursor within a node, meaning
> for example between which letters the cursor is. We also can get some
> information about the rendered objects, for example width and height and
> position, but we can't get the information on which line the cursor is
> and which letter is "above" the cursor. This is just one issue we had
> with the self-grown cursor, therefore I still think we have to stick to
> the Caret Browser Mode for the time being

I understand completly that the issues you are fighting are not easy at
all.  But often *users* react quite ignorant of low-level technical
problems.  If Notepad can do it, why can't this program do it? 

In the meantime i also analyzed the situation with a (javascript-) 
friend and he stated that working XML/DOM-based with current
brwosers forces one to hack around lots of bugs.  And some things like
cursors are *hard* to do at all. And we are not even talking about 
cross-browser here.  There is no stable javascript-editor currently
which doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for one.  The only solutions so 
far seem to involve java.

> Buuut, my Netscape visit last week revealed that they are really hard
> working on ContentEditable support. It won't be in 1.2 (IIRC), but 1.3
> would be a viable target. I hope, this will resolve some issues with the
> cursor, but I'll try to improve it nevertheless.

Good news.  So taking everything into account, the main question probably is 
how much time to get a *stable* user-friendly basic WYSIWYG-editor?  I don't 
want to press on you at all because i know you are doing good work.  But it'
s important to have a *realistic* time schedule.  Both of us need a reasonable
plan for our customers. 

Probably you know that having simple clean code also has a lot more
chance to attract more developers.  ASFAIK we will meet on the 16th 
in Zuerich so we can discuss this in depth :-) 

and sorry for not telling about possible deadlines.  I wrongfully 
thought that you knew it.

have a good re-calibration,

    holger
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