At 9:30 AM -0800 3/17/01, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
[snip]
>But, although I mentioned rich text, what I really had in mind was plain
>text. Maybe in a rich text environment, where it is normal to get a run of
>text it and tag it with some property (e.g. underlined, bold, etc.), it
>would also be possible to select a block and say "this is embedded LTR
>text".
>
>But, in this case, each *single* character in the block must be
>independently flagged with the property, so that it retains it also if it is
>copied&pasted somewhere else: the actual start and end codes will only be
>generated when rebuilding the Unicode string at the end of editing.
>
>_ Marco
Definitely not the case. Copying would be a problem when using
embedded codes in linear marked up text, like HTML, where you might
have to search the whole text to determine what tags were active at a
specific point.
Real rich text editors use *parallel* markup, where each tag is
associated explicitly with a run of text. The tags can be kept doubly
indexed. When you cut a section from within a tagged area, you can go
out and find which tags to associate with the copy very quickly.
--Edward Cherlin, Spamfighter <http://www.cauce.org> "It isn't what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that ain't so."--Mark Twain, or else some other prominent 19th century humorist and wit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:14 EDT