Designing

I am designing <richtext> behavior for htmlayout/sciter… So far I like the way it allows to edit the text.

There are interesting usability problems bubble up sometimes… Let’s say you have following document:

<body>
  <pre>
     ....
  </pre>
  <table>
     ....
  </table>
</body>

And now imagine that you need to insert some text (paragraph) between the table and that pre block. Or insert paragraph (<p>) at the beginning of the document – before the <pre>…

I do not know any WYSIWYG HTML editor that allow to handle such operations.

So I have invented “horizontal caret” that marks start-block-position. Enter key in that position causes new paragraph to be inserted.

Here is an example of such caret – blinking black bar in top-left corner of the pre element:

richtext, horizontal caret

3 Replies to “Designing

  1. To Kubik: that is far from WYSIWYG. How do you know that Ctrl-Enter will do something at this position?

  2. I have been wondering about this for years… Even if Frontpage seems to accomodate for it, it is far from intuitive. Well done.

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