Re: Musings on creating an HTML-based WYSIWYG mode

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> This is, of course, not like what Emacs does normally when editing text,
>> and would break a lot of invariants that people are used to.
>
> I don't think so, actually.  At least, I don't think it should be very
> serious issue (and in the worst case we could do a comparison between
> the old and new rendering to try and modify only the "relevant" portion
> of the buffer).
> IOW, nothing too worrisome.

I was thinking about things, like, "what does it mean to kill a
rectangle in a buffer that's auto-reformatted"?  Do we re-render after
each "piece" that's been killed?  (Probably not.)  What about when the
user types `M-x query-replace-regexp RET ^foo RET bar'...  If we
re-render after each replacement (or not), then there might be lines
starting with "foo" after it has run, anyway (because things will be
re-flowing).

Stuff like that.

I'm not saying that these are insurmountable obstacles or anything, but
there will be these things that people are used to using that may or may
not work the same in a WYSIWYG context, and that dealing with them will
probably require just living with it a bit, thinking about each case,
and adjusting things as we go along.

>> But like I said, I don't have time at the moment.  :-)
>
> Sounds like the ideal moment to start hacking then!

:-)

I think it'll have to wait until my next holiday.  But if anybody else
wants to take a stab at it, don't wait for me.  

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no