Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Multiplatform WebEdit setup

Author:Brent Simmons
Posted:4/7/1999; 11:27:03 PM
Topic:Multiplatform WebEdit setup
Msg #:4870 (In response to 4868)
Prev/Next:4869 / 4871

Could some callbacks be added to the client side of WebEdit ?

Perhaps. But here's why character conversion is not the straightforward issue you might think.

A little background: WebEdit works by packing a Frontier object and sending it to the server. The server then unpacks the object in the proper location.

WebEdit does not send plain text. If it did, a client-side callback might be appropriate: you could convert the text before sending it.

The better way to convert text is on the server side, right after unpacking the object. With the new version of WebEdit, you already have a callback that will let you do this.

But note -- there are times when you want to convert text and times when you don't. For instance, if you send a gif stored in the odb via WebEdit, you obviously don't want its data converted at the other end. But what if you're sending a string? It's easy to imagine times when conversion is appropriate, and times when it's not.

The same goes for scripts: I might have a line in a script that reads "if ch < 'È'" on one platform and "if ch < 'é'" on another -- but I don't want the character conversion, because the meaning is supposed to be "if ch < 233" in both places.

Granted, much of the use of WebEdit is checking in and out wp-texts and outlines -- web page source -- but just because that's what most people do most of the time doesn't make the issue easier.

I'm not ruling out client callbacks, but I'll need to hear more compelling reasons. Character conversion is do-able (in the new version) via server callbacks. And you can write a customized client that talks to a WebEdit server without much difficulty -- the client side of WebEdit is small and straightforward, there's not much code there.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:49:15 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.