Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
outliner wish list
Author: ssl@prefab.com Posted: 9/17/2000; 1:29:18 PM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 9/16/2000 Msg #: 21448 (In response to 21409) Prev/Next: 21447 / 21449
>We have Frontier users, and they have been asking for improvements to the outliner for years. It's frustrating to me that more of them are not in the loop. They're going to complain later that they didn't know we were improving the outliner.My outliner wish list:
1. color-coded HTML
2. enhanced paste "filter" from plain text ... details below
3. hide attributes and/or tagsWhy? Even though I'm a hard-core outlining fan (e.g. continue to use MORE regularly), I generally use BBEdit (Mac) or EditPlus (Win32) for HTML. Color-coding helps me focus on whatever sort of change I'm making, whether content or links or format. Enhanced "paste" would at a minimum preserve indentation and blank lines (see below) and at best make it easier to start from existing content created elsewhere without spending tons of time cleaning it up first. Finally, I sometimes use a WYSIWYG editor so I can focus on the content. I don't expect RU's outliner to mimic that, but 2 things could be done in that direction: show tags but hide the attributes (that lets me focus on basic structure without bothering with the details ... analogous to collapsing in an outline!), hide tags and just show content.
Scott
My top "paste" issue:
- blank lines get indented, e.g.
THIS
parent1
[indent]child
[blank]
parent2BECOMES
parent1
[indent]child
[indent][blank]
parent2By itself it's a minor thing, but it's annoying since it destroys the blank lines that I put in to make the thing more readable (when collapsed).
A much harder problem is dealing with haphazardly indented HTML, though I'll bet someone could handle many common cases without extraordinary effort.
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