Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Seb, a recent addition to my aggregator talks of Properly mapping weblog conversations... <snip> Jon Schull has worked on a tool for blogthread visualization and has discussed the idea of a taxonomy of blogverbs, to describe approbation, opposition, etc. [Seb's Open Research] Excellent to see the weblog community getting to the notion of link types, affirming my earlier observation of weblogs rediscovering hypertextual principles (see Hypertext in the Blogdom). 12:40:08 PM    comment

Scott asks for a rich text editor to replace the regular textarea's in Mozilla. It's tantalizingly close, even without S's generous financial incentive. The bug HTML editor for <textarea> (HTMLArea) has a proof of concept implementation using XBL to swap enable a iframe editing="true' for rich editor implementation. XBL is nifty like that, allowing you to extend the HTML language with new attributes and tags. Alas, Simon's proof of concept is not working for me in Moz1.1. Time to do some debugging... Three possible approaches: Fix the radio rich text editor to use w3c compliant dom methods, no innerText and no document.all. Alas, this widget is built on the IE "document.designMode" code. The nearest equivalent is Composer leading to option #2. Augment the textarea with XBL to support contenteditable=true or richtext=true. Swap out the textarea with an Iframe containing a XUL Composer doc. Advantage: works for mozilla in whatever app you want it to -- we could optionally add a context menu option or button for all textareas lacking the attribute. Pursue Simon's code from bugzilla. This seems like the most likely to land in the tree, but also the most likely to require C++ coding... not my gig. A recent feature request at klogs(?) asked for resizable textareas, that too could be done. The general notion of bounties for features/bugs within Mozilla has surfaced a bit, see bug 124048 on roaming profiles for some response. 8:32:05 AM    comment