[g-a-devel] RFC: AtkText simplification (take 2)

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

Hi everybody,

sorry for not answering the previous thread. The thread started while I
was on holidays, and when I arrived most of the discussions were already
settled. And when I say that was settled, I mean that the plan was doing
a fist simplification, as a first step towards a sane API. Quoting from
the original thread [1]:

"1. Deprecate atk_text_get_text_{before,after}_offset()
 2. Deprecate the TEXT_BOUNDARY_FOO_{START,END}

<skip>


In the second case, clients such as Orca would use (through AT-SPI2) a
brand new set of TEXT_BOUNDARY_FOO boundaries. My guess is that we'd
want it to mimic the behavior of the current START results, but that
will require some investigation to be sure."

Joanmarie already made the port on Orca, showing that having "just" that
API is enough for an AT (good job, and thanks). Taking that into
account, I made the deprecations and closed the ATK bug for this problem
[1]. Basically I did:
  * Mark as deprecated atk_text_get_text_{before,after}_offset
  * Document as deprecate ATK_TEXT_BOUNDARY_WORD_END,
ATK_TEXT_BOUNDARY_SENTENCE_END and ATK_TEXT_BOUNDARY_LINE_END
  * Change the documentation of atk_text_get_text_{at,before,after}_offset
     * Right now is basically the removal to any reference to _END
boundaries.

As Joanmarie said on that thread, the idea is not having any _END/_START
boundaries, and the "surviving" boundary would mimic what _START is
doing right now. Anyway, as I said this is the first step, and probably
the only thing that we can do on ATK 2.X without breaking the API/ABI.

I hope that this would lead to having a proper/saner documentation on
the "surviving" method.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Best regards.

PS: these changes are included on ATK release 2.9.3 that I made today.

[1]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-devel/2013-April/msg00000.html
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697968

-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias