Re: Re: [IDEA] HTML-export literal examples to textarea

[Manish <mailtomanish.sharma@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Ulf Stegemann wrote:
> Carsten Dominik wrote:
>
>> On Jan 19, 2009, at 8:25 AM, Ulf Stegemann wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Carsten,
>>>
>>> Carsten Dominik wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Jan 16, 2009, at 10:51 AM, Ulf Stegemann wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Is it worth thinking about an example block that will be exported to a
>>>>> "<p><textarea ...>...</textarea></p>" structure in HTML export?
>>>>>
>>>>> I was recently playing around with org for online documentation. The
>>>>> documents contained lots of literal examples that can be directly copied
>>>>> and pasted e.g. into a terminal emu. While example- and src blocks work
>>>>> fine, I think that putting this kind of information into a textarea
>>>>> would be even better.
>>>>
>>>> Hi Ulf, so far I fail to see what the big advantage would be.  Can
>>>> you try again to explain?
>>>
>>> of course. Generally, selecting text is a bit easier inside an input box
>>> but the very real advantage is that you can edit inside inputs. This
>>> allows to give literal examples with "variables" that can be changed
>>> directly inside the page before being copied and pasted.
>>
>> Hmmm, but why would you want to edit them in the text window, if you
>> will paste them into an editor anyway, where you probably can edit
>> them a lot easier?  Or are you talking about pasting examples
>> directly into an interpreter input stream?
>
> yes, in the concrete case the documentation was about a rather complex
> system and software setup and the "examples" were mainly meant to be
> copied and pasted directly into an terminal emu ... with variable things
> like host-, path-, user names an so on. Of course, one could paste this
> in an editor first to change something but as the changes would be
> rather minimal this would prove to be a bit clumsy.
>
> Actually nobody seems to do it like this. I asked the target group how
> they handle this and they told me, they just selected the text up to the
> first variable, pasted it into the terminal, typed their variable value
> into the terminal and then selected the rest of the example to complete
> their command line(s).

Ditto.  Some of the documents I prepared for a team to follow was also
used exactly like that: copy-paste a small section, enter some text by
hand in terminal, copy-paste the remaining portion.  What happens when
you edit the text in text area and save the HTML file?  Does the
modification get saved?  In any case, seems like a useful option to
have.  Seconded.

-- 
Manish