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

Re: Frontier 6 Outliner

Author:Michael Myers
Posted:1/8/1999; 2:43:36 PM
Topic:Frontier 6 Outliner
Msg #:1921 (In response to 1916)
Prev/Next:1920 / 1922

Nicholas Riley said:

But there are two things that make me not quite understand how it would work in Frontier.

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I've thought about it too, but didn't want to say anything until I had a sense of UserLand's feelings on the general idea.

Since Frontier was not built from the ground up to do it, the solutions seem like kludges.

The coder needs a way to tell Frontier that the given outline element is a "here document", maybe something similar to the way we convert an element to a comment. Then variable names will get substituted as is. The printf() function in C does this -- no special characters are needed to denote a variable name. This seems better than requiring a special syntax for variables. WinBatch uses that strategy -- you enclose your variable name in a pair of percent signs to signify substitution within a string. Messy. Most people use distinctive variable names anyway. When needed, a backslash or single quotes could be used to protect a token against substitution.

Since the primary reason for doing this is to ease generation of HTML within script, any metacharacters that you actually want displayed could be entered in HTML entity format.

I don't know what sort of performance hit this would entail. What about odb references? The script parser would have to evaluate these.

You would want to be able to enter a line break that didn't produce a new outline entry (as the Return key does). Since shift-return is already taken (creates a comment), it would have to be a more complex. Ctrl-Shift-Return on Windows, is option-Return available on Mac?

I admit, it all seems rather inelegant. Probably the source of Doug's reluctance!

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