Re: UI - object-activation and deactivation

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Lutz  / Jody,

        No a good question, but no obvious answer :-)

        Here is my take -

        We need 2 approaches,

                a) Complex, multi-component apps
                b) Compound documents  

        The current UI handler is good for a) since it is so flexible, you
can do a lot with it to get things to merge nicely.
  
        For b) (old versions of) Office seem to do this:
  
        On component merge - destroy all container menus except 'File',   
merge all editing etc. menus into container. 'File' menu always applies to
the main application, and no 'File' submenus are merged. Thus to 'Save'   
the sub-component you'd need to do a right click on it or something.
  
        This seems to me to be a reasonable, (and rather trivial) thing to
do. Since when you're component is in-place activated, you have selected  
to be editing that specific component, and not the rest of the document,  
and the view / tools should reflect this IMHO.
  
        How we best set about making this work for compound documents I   
don't quite know - here is where any clues would be greatly appreciated.  
Clearly it could be implemented by the container - automation here would  
be nice, or by the containee [ but this sucks ].  
  
        I think we might want some nice View / ViewFrame type logic to    
make this happen - but Mike Kestner has been working on a re-vamp of all  
this, and has written a nice paper that I hope he'll publish soon - so we
should integrate with his work.
  
        How does that sound ?
  
        Regards,

                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot